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Class J 6 

Book.-.. 

Copyright N° . 

COPYRIGHT DEPOSIT. 



England's Effort 

Letters to an American Friend 



England's Effort 

Letters to an American Friend 



By 

Mrs. Humphry Ward 



With a Preface by 
Joseph H. Choate 



New York 

Charles Scribner's Sons 

1916 



-J16 + 
• H/33 



COPTRIGHT, 1916, BT 

CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS 
Published May, 1916 




JUN 3 1916 

©CU433261 
'Ho, /* 



Preface 

HAS ENGLAND DONE ALL SHE COULD? 

That is the question which Mrs. Ward, replying to some 
doubts and queries of an American friend, has under- 
taken to answer in this series of letters, and every one 
who reads them will admit that her answer is as com- 
plete and triumphant as it is thrilling. Nobody but a 
woman, an Englishwoman of warm heart, strong brain, 
and vivid power of observation, could possibly have 
written these letters which reflect the very soul of Eng- 
land since this wicked and cruel war began. She has 
unfolded and interpreted to us, as no one else, I think, 
has even attempted to do, the development and abso- 
lute transformation of English men and women, which 
has enabled them, living and dying, to secure for their 
proud nation under God that "new birth of freedom" 
which Lincoln at Gettysburg prophesied for his own 
countrymen. Really the cause is the same, to secure 
the selfsame thing, "that government of the people, 
by the people, and for the people may not perish from 



vi PREFACE 

the earth";— -and if any American wishes to know how 
this has been accomplished, he must read these letters, 
which were written expressly for our enlightenment. 

Mrs. Ward had marvellous qualifications for this 
patriotic task. The granddaughter of Doctor Arnold 
and the niece of Matthew Arnold, from childhood 
up she has been as deeply interested in politics and in 
public affairs as she has been in literature, by which 
she has attained such world-wide fame, and next to 
English politics, in American politics and American 
opinion. She has been a staunch believer in the great- 
ness of America's future, and has maintained close 
friendship with leaders of public thought on both sides 
of the water. Her only son is a member of Parliament, 
and is fighting in the trenches in France, just as all the 
able-bodied men she knows are doing. 

She has received from the English government special 
opportunities of seeing what England has been doing 
in the war, and has been allowed to go with her daughter 
where few English men and no other women have been 
allowed to go, to see the very heart of England's pre- 
paredness. She has visited, since the war began, the 
British fleet, the very key of the whole situation, with- 
out whose unmatched power and ever-increasing strength 
the Allies at the outset must have succumbed. She 



PREFACE vii 

has watched, always under the protection and guidance 
of that wonderful new Minister of Munitions, Lloyd 
George, the vast activity of that ministry throughout 
the country, and finally in a motor tour of five hundred 
miles, through the zone of the English armies in France, 
she has seen with her own eyes, that marvellous organi- 
zation of everything that goes to make and support a 
great army, which England has built up in the course 
of eighteen months behind her fighting line. She has 
witnessed within three-quarters of a mile of the fight- 
ing line, with a gas helmet at hand, ready to put on, a 
German counter attack after a successful English ad- 
vance, something which no other woman, except her- 
self and her daughter, who accompanied her, has ever 
had the opportunity to see. 

Mrs. Ward admits that at the beginning England 
was unprepared, which itself demonstrated that as a 
Nation she never wished for war with Germany, and 
never expected it. Her countrymen had no faith in 
Lord Roberts's ten-year-long agitation for universal 
national service, based on the portentous growth of 
the German army and navy. She never knew of any 
hatred of Germany in the country. On the contrary, 
she realized what England and all the rest of the 
world owed to Germany in so many ways. 



viii PREFACE 

England was not absolutely unprepared in the sense 
that the United States is unprepared, even for self- 
defense from external attack, but except for the fleet 
and her little expeditionary force, England had neither 
men nor equipment equal to the fighting of a great Con- 
tinental war. 

The wholly unexpected news of the invasion of Bel- 
gium aroused the whole country to realize that war on 
a scale never known before had come, and, as the firing 
upon Fort Sumter awakened America, convinced Eng- 
land that she must fight to the death for her liberties, 
unready as she was; — but Mr. Balfour, the First Lord of 
the Admiralty, says that, since the war began, she has 
added one million to the tonnage of her navy, and has 
doubled its personnel, and is adding more every day. 

In the matter of munitions the story that Mrs. Ward 
tells is wonderful, almost beyond belief. Much had been 
done in the first eight months of the war, in the building 
of munition shops, and the ordering of vast quantities 
from abroad, before the second battle of Ypres, in 
April, 1915, which led to the formation of the new Coa- 
lition Ministry, including a wholly new department, the 
Ministry of Munitions, with Mr. Lloyd George at its 
head. 

From that time to this the work has been colossal, 



PREFACE ix 

and almost incredible, and without serious collision 
with the working classes. Vast new buildings have 
been erected all over England, and a huge staff, running 
into thousands, set in action. The new Minister has set 
out with determination to get the thing done at what- 
ever cost, and to remove all obstacles that he found in 
his way. The Government has absolutely taken con- 
trol of the whole work of the creation of munitions and 
the regulation of workmen, employed in it by whatever 
employers, and everything and everybody has had to 
submit to his imperious will, and the greatest change 
of all has been the employment of women on a vast 
scale to do the work that only men had ever done be- 
fore. France had set about it immediately after the 
battle of the Marne, and allowed no Frenchman to re- 
main idle who could do such work. 

Mrs. Ward does not fail to do full justice to the work- 
ing men of Great Britain, and shows that besides the 
hundreds of thousands that they have sent to the fight- 
ing line, a million and a half remained at work in the 
shops, creating munitions with the aid of skilled experts 
and the astonishing help of the women, who never be- 
fore had expected to have anything to do with guns 
and shells, with bombs, rifles, and machine-guns. The 
old ways were laid aside, old distinctions of class and sex 



x PREFACE 

forgotten, and all worked with a common and indomita- 
ble will for the saving of the country. 

To give a single instance, what was a few months ago 
a smiling pasture is now found covered with vast build- 
ings, in which these manufactures are carried on by thirty- 
five hundred working people, of whom a large propor- 
tion are women. I love to quote a single sentence from 
the utterance of her companion on a visit to this estab- 
lishment: "As to the women, they are saving the 
country. They don't mind what they do. Hours? 
They work ten and a half, or, with overtime, twelve 
hours a day, seven days a week. The Government are 
insisting on one Sunday, or two Sundays a month off. 
I don't say they aren't right, but the women resent it. 
'We're not tired,' they say. And look at them ! They 
are not tired." 

This unheard-of spectacle of great engineering estab- 
lishments filled with women, all hard at work, is a sure 
proof of the undying purpose of the whole English race. 
They are mostly young and comely, and their beauty 
of form and feature is only enhanced by their enthu- 
siasm for their labors, and at the same time it has in- 
creased the ardor and intensity of their fellow workmen. 
Mrs. Ward found four thousand women to five thousand 
men engaged in this nation-saving labor, in a single 



PREFACE xi 

establishment. They know that they are setting the 
skilled laborers free for work which women cannot 
do, and the unskilled in large numbers free for the 
army. 

Every building, as well as every man and woman, 
that could be put to the work, has been availed of, and 
the results have been incredible. Another instance she 
gives of special interest: "An old warehouse, bought, 
so to speak, overnight, and equipped next morning, has 
been turned into a small workshop for shell production, 
employing between three and four hundred girls with 
the number of skilled men necessary to keep the new 
unskilled labor going. These girls are working on the 
eight-hours' shift system; working so well that a not 
uncommon wage among them, on piece-work, of course, 
runs to somewhere between two and three pounds a 
week," and all the time they are at work they remember 
that they are doing common service with their husbands, 
and sweethearts, and sons, and brothers, who are peril- 
ling their lives in the trenches. 

None of this distinguished writer's romances com- 
pare in vivid description and heart-inspiring eloquence 
with these accounts that she gives of what she has seen 
with her own eyes of the resurrection of England. 

It is not for me to anticipate her startling and thrill- 



xii PREFACE 

ing narratives on this subject. She takes for her text 
what Mr. Lloyd George said in his speech in the House 
of Commons on reviewing his new department: "Un- 
less we quicken our movements, damnation will fall on 
the sacred cause for which so much gallant blood has 
flowed," and Mr. Asquith's serious words in December: 
"We cannot go on," said he, "depending upon foreign 
countries for our munitions. We haven't the ships to 
spare to bring them home, and the cost is too great. 
We must make them ourselves." 

Mrs. Ward dwells with keen insight upon the difficul- 
ties met with among the trade-unions and labor people, 
and successfully overcome, and explains in full what 
they call over there the work of the Dilution Commis- 
sioners, which is a wholly new phrase for us, and she 
gives this clear definition: "Dilution means, of course, 
that under the sharp analysis of necessity, much engi- 
neering work, generally reckoned as 'skilled' work, and 
reserved to 'skilled' workmen by a number of union 
regulations, is seen to be capable of solution into vari- 
ous processes, some of which can be sorted out from the 
others, as within the capacity of the unskilled, or semi- 
skilled worker. By so dividing them up and using su- 
perior labor with economy, only where it is really neces- 
sary, it can be made to go infinitely further, and the in- 



PREFACE xiii 

ferior, or untrained, labor can then be brought into work 
where nobody supposed it could be used; where, in fact, 
it never has been used." This novel experiment, to- 
gether with the equally novel employment of women in 
such work, soon proved a triumphant success, and the 
women proved themselves able to do the work of men, 
some of it even better. There were, of course, difficul- 
ties at first, but the mischief, whatever it was, was 
quickly cured, and in one factory that Mrs. Ward names, 
"men and women soon began to do their best. The out- 
put of the factory, which had been planned for four 
thousand shells a week, ran up to twenty thousand, and 
everything has gone smoothly since." 

The adaptation of firms and factories, already exist- 
ing, the control of which was taken by the Government, 
was wonderful, but the national shell-factories, founded, 
financed, and run by the Ministry of Munitions, are 
more wonderful still, and give us many new ideas about 
government ownership in an emergency, which we may 
sometimes have to think of more seriously. The speed, 
the efficiency, the success of the new system have been 
marvellous, so that in the short space of a year the de- 
mands of Mr. Lloyd George and Mr. Asquith have been 
satisfied, and England will depend no more upon for- 
eign contracts and foreign supplies for her ammunition, 



xiv PREFACE 

but will be able not only to manufacture all she can use 
herself, but to help to supply her Allies. 

In one department of labor, it is a very startling 
thing to learn that "in a single fuse factory, what they 
call the danger buildings, mostly women are employed. 
About five hundred women are found at work in one of 
these factories on different processes connected with 
the delicate mechanism and filling of the fuse and gaine, 
some of which is really dangerous, like detonator work." 
It is the insertion in the shell of the little pellet which 
gives it its death-dealing power, that is so risky, but the 
women do not shrink from even this. In the largest 
fuse shop known, quite new, fourteen hundred girls, in 
one shift, are at work. 

"An endless spectacle of gun-carriages, naval turrets, 
torpedo-tubes, army railway-carriages, small Hotchkiss 
guns for merchant ships, tool-making shops, gauge shops, 
seems to be going on forever, and in the tool-making 
shops the output has risen from forty-four thousand to 
three million a year." The vastness of the work, and 
the incessant and enormous multiplication of all the 
products for war must be as overwhelming as it is monot- 
onous. And then there were the huge shipyards, which 
before the war were capable of the berth of twenty 
ships at once, from the largest battleship downward, 



PREFACE xv 

and which, as we have already had Mr. Balfour's word 
for it, have since the beginning of the war added a mil- 
lion tons to the navy, but Mrs. Ward in her rapid jour- 
neys had not time to stop and inspect these, to our very 
great regret, for her description of them would have 
been most instructive. 

She declares from actual observation that in the Clyde 
district, in whose populous centre some threats of dis- 
quiet have existed, the work done by thousands and tens 
of thousands of workmen since the beginning of the war, 
especially in the great shipyards, and done with the 
heartiest and most self-sacrificing good-will, has been 
simply invaluable to the nation, and will never be for- 
gotten, and the invasion of women there has, perhaps, 
been more startling to the workmen than anywhere 
else. Where not a single woman was employed in the 
works and factories before the war, except in textiles, 
"there will soon be fifteen thousand of them in the 
munition workshops alone, and that will not be the 
end." 

Wherever she goes, Mrs. Ward's eyes are wide open. 
From her own home, which is in the midst of one of the 
most patriotic regions of the realm, she can witness the 
perpetual activity which has come about in preparation 
for the war in all its varied phases and branches; every- 



xvi PREFACE 

thing and everybody is in vigorous motion, both there 
and in all the counties of England which she has visited. 
Great camps in every direction for the shelter and train- 
ing of recruits, all coming and going, all marching and 
countermarching, training and drilling everywhere, and 
as fast as the citizen is converted into a soldier, he is 
bound for the seat of war with all the equipments that 
war requires, tramping everywhere, tramp, tramp, along 
the land; tramp, tramp, along the sea, until the new 
supports, all ready for vital service, reach their destina- 
tion on French soil. 

Mrs. Ward has made a careful study of the effect of 
the novel introduction of women into all these works 
of men, especially in the munition factories, and dwells 
with great significance upon the rapidity of the women's 
piece-work and the mingling of classes, where educated 
and refined girls work side by side and very happily with 
those of an humbler type. What Mrs. Ward well calls 
"the common spirit" inspires them all, and holds them 
all in just and equal relations. At every step she is 
startled by the vastness of the work and the immense 
hand that women have in it, finding one shop turning 
out about four thousand shrapnel and four thousand 
high-explosive shells per week, heavy shell work all, 
which they thought at first they must furnish men to lift 






PREFACE xvii 

in and out of the machines, but "the women thrust the 
men aside in five minutes." Surely this new education 
of women, of these girls and women who are to become 
the mothers of the next generation, must have a most 
inspiring and exalting effect upon the days to come. 
War may be postponed for whole generations, but Eng- 
land will never fail to be ready for it as a necessary part 
of the education of the race. 

It is quite evident that this war is breaking down the 
barriers that have heretofore been impassable, not only 
between men and women, but between the various 
classes of society, and that it cannot possibly end with- 
out bringing these more closely together, all working to 
the same end in a more perfect harmony, and that the 
result of it must be that England will hereafter be an 
even more perfect democracy than it has been up to this 
time. 

France! Glorious France! The conduct of whose 
government and people in the war seems to have been 
absolutely perfect, has at last reached a wonderful re- 
sult after her hundred years of agonies and revolutions. 
We hear from France no complaints, no internal dis- 
sensions, but all the people, mankind and womankind, 
working together, each in its proper sphere, to the one 
common end, the salvation of the State. I trust that we 



xviii PREFACE 

shall never forget all that the world and we, especially, 
owe to France. She is adding to our obligations now by 
fighting our battles for us. 

And now with her daughter under the special protec- 
tion and guidance of the war office, this distinguished 
woman followed the khaki-clad soldiers of England, now 
numbered by millions, across the channel, and every- 
thing was thrown freely open to her. She soon found 
out what the great supply bases, on which the British 
army in France rests, really mean, made up of the 
Army Ordnance, Army Service, Army Medical, Rail- 
road, Motor, and Transport, and she found it a deeply 
interesting study, "whose work has involved the labor 
of some of the best brains in the army," and she learned 
the organizing power that has gone to make the career 
of the English army in France possible. 

There was the immense dock, and its vast store- 
house, the largest in the world, "built three years be- 
fore the war, partly, it is said, by German money, to 
house the growing cotton trade of the port, but now it 
houses a large proportion of the food of the British 
army," a building half a mile long, bounded on one side 
by the docks, where the ships discharge the stores and 
the men, and on the other by the railway lines where the 
trains are perpetually loading for the front. , On the 



PREFACE xix 

quays ships of all nations, except Germany, are pouring 
out their stores, and on the other side the trucks that 
are going to the front are loading with the supplies that 
are wanted for every regiment in the service. Her 
eyes light upon one wired in space, labelled "Medical 
Comforts," and generally known as "The Cage," where, 
while medical necessaries are housed elsewhere, are "the 
dainties, the special foods, the easing appliances of all 
kinds," which are to make life bearable to the wounded 
men, and she stops to think how the shade of Florence 
Nightingale would have paused at this spot. 

The huge sheds of Army Ordnance are filled with every- 
thing that a soldier does not eat, all metal stores, what- 
ever, and the men who work in them are housed in one of 
the longest sheds in tiers of bunks from floor to ceiling, 
and then there are the repairing sheds and workshops, 
established near by, and that is the most wonderful thing 
of the whole to my mind — never done before in connec- 
tion with an army in the field. Trainsful of articles to be 
repaired come down from the front every day, and almost 
every imaginable article that the men at the front can use, 
from guns to boots, comes here to be repaired, or if found 
beyond repair, to be sent to Yorkshire for shoddy. The 
marvellous thing is that, as soon as they are received, 
they are repaired and made nearly as good as new and 



xx PREFACE 

returned to their owners at the front, a vast work in 
itself. The boot and uniform sheds alone, where again 
she finds five hundred French women and girls, and the 
harness-making room are doing an enormous work. 
The Colonel in charge began work with one hundred 
and forty men, and is now employing more than a thou- 
sand, and his repairing sheds are saving thousands of 
pounds a week to the British government. 

Recreation and amusement are supplied in near local- 
ity for the waiting soldiers and, although the snow is 
more than ankle-deep, they visit such places as recrea- 
tion rooms and cinema theaters, and on a neighboring 
hill great troops of men are going through some of the 
last refinements of drill before they start for the front. 
Here are trenches of all kinds and patterns, in which 
the men may practise, planned according to the latest 
experience brought from the front. "The instructors 
are all men returned from the front, and the new re- 
cruits, trained up to this last point, would not be patient 
of any other teachers." 

Having thus seen all that one day could afford them 
at the very base of the great army, our visitors make 
their way in closed motors through the snow, passing 
scores of motor lorries, and other wagons, stuck in the 
snow-drifts. They stop for the night at a pleasant 



PREFACE xxi 

hotel full of officers, mostly English, belonging to the 
Lines of Communication, and a few of the mothers and 
sisters of the poor wounded in the neighboring hospi- 
tals, who have come over to nurse them. 

Every gun, every particle of [munition, clothing, and 
equipment, and whatever else is necessary, including 
the food of the armies, every horse, every vehicle, has 
to be brought across the British channel, to maintain 
and reinforce the ever-growing British army, and the 
ever-daily increasing congestion at all the ports makes 
it more and more difficult every day to receive, dis- 
embark, accommodate, and forward the multitude of 
men and the masses of material, and all the time there 
are thousands of troops passing through, thousands in 
the hospitals, and thousands at work on the docks and 
storehouses. Everything tending to Tommy Atkins's 
comfort is supplied, including again palatial cinemas 
and concerts, all of which results in excellent behavior 
and the best of relations between the British soldier 
and the French inhabitants. At the docks armies of 
laborers and lines of ships discharging men, horses, tim- 
ber, rations, fodder, coal, coke, petrol, and the same at 
the storehouses and depots. 

The visitors spend a long Sunday morning in the 
motor transport depot, and it gave a good illustration 



xxii PREFACE 

of the complete system of discipline and organization 
that prevailed everywhere. This depot began, said the 
Colonel in charge, on the 13th of August, 1914, "with 
a few balls of string and a bag of nails." Its present 
staff is about five hundred. All the drivers of twenty 
thousand motor vehicles are tested here, and the depot 
exhibits three hundred and fifty different types of vehi- 
cles, and in round figures, one hundred thousand sepa- 
rate parts are now dealt with, stored, and arranged in 
this same depot. The Sunday morning began with a 
simple service in the Young Men's Christian Associa- 
tion hut, at which five hundred motor-drivers attended, 
about half of the whole number in the station. 

The same day they explored endless camps and the 
wards of a Red Cross hospital. It was impossible to 
take in everything at once, and our ladies retired at 
night, bewildered by mingled impressions of "human 
energy, human intelligence, human suffering," but full 
of pride and exultation at the efficiency of their coun- 
try and of the good relations of their soldiers with the 
French. They carried with them as a last impression 
of the day the picture of a canteen worked day and 
night in three shifts by a heroic band of women close 
by the railway station, full of soldiers just departing 
for the front, young, gay and full of spirits; then came 



PREFACE xxiii 

the train to take the soldiers off for the fighting line, 
and the women, left behind, set up the song, already 
familiar in the Midlands, "Keep the home fires burn- 
ing till the boys come home." 

In the village where they stopped, some forty miles 
from the actual front, a special messenger from the 
general headquarters brings the amazing news that 
General Headquarters invites Mrs. Ward and her 
daughter for two days, and will send a motor for them, 
if they accept, which, of course, they did upon the in- 
stant, looking forward with eagerness to the great mys- 
teries of the front, its camps, its men, and its hospitals, 
that they were to see with their own eyes to-morrow. 

The remainder of the day before they are to start for 
the front suffices for the visit to a camp set down in one 
of the pleasantest spots in France, a favorite haunt 
of French artists before the war, now occupied by a 
British reinforcement camp, the trees having all been 
cut away, by long lines of hospitals, by a convalescent 
depot, and by the training grounds, to which we have 
already referred. 

I must copy the bare catalogue of what this vast 
camp contained: "Sleeping and mess quarters for those 
belonging to the new armies; sixteen hospitals with 
twenty-one thousand beds" (and this shows now what 



xxiv PREFACE 

it was to be near the front) ; " rifle ranges; training camps ; 
a vast laundry, worked by French women under British 
organization, which washes for all the hospitals thirty 
thousand pieces a day; recreation huts of every possible 
kind; a cinema theatre seating eight hundred men, with 
performances twice a day; nurses clubs; officers clubs; 
a supply depot for food; an ordnance depot for every- 
thing that is not food; railroad sidings on which every 
kind of man and thing can go out and come in without 
interruption; a convalescents' depot of two thousand 
patients; and a convalescent horse depot of two thou- 
sand horses; all this in one camp, established since last 
April. ,, 

Ah! But the deepest impression left on the minds 
of our ladies is of the terrible sufferings in the hospitals, 
of the smiling endurance with which they were borne, 
of the timely skill, pity, and devotion of the doctors 
and nurses, taking care of the twenty thousand wounded. 
Realizing the sympathy of America with all these 
scenes and sufferings, they do not fail to note the hos- 
pitals organized by the Universities of Chicago and of 
Harvard, staffed by American sisters and doctors, each 
providing thirty-four doctors and eighty nurses, and 
dealing with a thousand patients, and a convalescent 
depot of two thousand beds. Every day the ambu- 



PREFACE xxv 

lance train comes in, and splendid hospital ships are 
taking the brave wounded back to England for home 
and rest. 

And now came the day in which they were to motor 
forty miles to be the guests of the G. H. Q. Soon they 
seemed to be in the midst of the battle, "our own guns 
were thundering away behind us, and the road was 
more and more broken up by shell holes." The British 
lines are just beyond, cottages close by, and the German 
lines just in front of a wood near them, three-quarters 
of a mile away. Already they had been nearer than 
any woman, even a nurse, had been in this war, to the 
actual fighting on the English line, and the cup of im- 
pressions was full. They actually saw the brave boys 
whom they had passed an hour before, sitting in the 
fields waiting for orders, now marching into the trenches 
to take their turn there — they knew that they were 
marching into the jaws of death, but they walked as 
quietly and as cheerfully as if they were going to a 
parade, the guns crashing close by them all the time. 
The firing being too hot for the women, the captain in 
charge of them was relieved when they elected to turn 
back. 

The next day, their second as guests of G. H. Q., as they 
came down from breakfast, our ladies were surprised 



xxvi PREFACE 

to find the motor at the door, a simple lunch being 
packed up, and gas-helmets got ready for them to use, 
for the captain greeted them in the best of spirits with 
the news that a very successful action had been fought 
that morning, "we had taken back some trenches on 
the Ypres-Comines Canal that we lost, a little while 
ago, and captured about two hundred prisoners; and 
if we go off at once we shall be in time to see the German 
counter attack." The one impossible thing for any 
woman ever to have hoped to see ! 

Somehow or other they very quickly got to the very 
post of danger. Soon they got close to the Tower of 
Ypres, which Mrs. Ward well describes as "mute wit- 
ness of a crime that beyond the reparation of our own 
day, history will revenge through years to come." Then 
the English guns spoke, and they watched and saw the 
columns of white smoke rising from the German lines 
as the shells burst. The German lines are right in sight, 
and soon their shells begin to burst on the English 
trenches. The German counter attack is on. All the 
famous sites of the early part of the war are then in 
sight, but all they can fully see is the bursting German 
shells, as from moment to moment they explode. 

In her final letter Mrs. Ward shows other great efforts 
which Great Britain has made since the war began; 



PREFACE xxvii 

that the taxes imposed for the support of the war and 
cheerfully borne demand a fourth part of his income 
from every well-to-do citizen; that five hundred million 
sterling, or twenty-five hundred million dollars have 
been already lent by Britain to her allies, a colossal por- 
tion of her income; that she has spent at the yearly rate 
of three thousand million dollars on the army, a thousand 
million dollars on the navy, while the munition depart- 
ment is costing about four hundred million sterling, and 
is employing close upon two million workers, one-tenth, I 
think, women; that the export trade of the country, in 
spite of submarines and lack of tonnage, is at this mo- 
ment greater than it was in the corresponding months 
of 1913; she has raised an army of four millions of men, 
and will get all she wants. 

What is more precious than all the rest, besides the vast 
amount of treasure that she has lavished upon the war, 
besides the rich mansions in all parts of the land that she 
has devoted to the uses of the sick and the wounded, she 
has given thousands, tens and hundreds of thousands of 
her choicest youth, who have willingly surrendered their 
lives for the great cause; young men of the noblest pedi- 
gree, without number, by their lives and deaths have 
attested their right to be regarded as the flower of the 
British youth; the professional classes and the univer- 



xxviii PREFACE 

sities have emptied their halls so that the men of Oxford 
and Cambridge might take their places with the rest, 
and offer up their lives as willing sacrifices, and all the 
men of England of every degree have joined with them 
and been welcomed as brothers in the ranks for the 
great sacrifice. The rank and file, who are fighting 
and dying for England, are fighting in the same spirit 
as their leaders and falling by the hundred thousand 
for the nation's salvation. How exactly Emerson's 
noble verse fits them: 

"So nigh is grandeur to our dust, 
So near is God to man, 
When Duty whispers low, 'Thou must,' 
The youth replies, 'I can!'" 

No one who reads this book can doubt for a moment, 
I think, that ENGLAND HAS DONE ALL SHE 
COULD, has put forth efforts worthy of her history 
and of her great traditions, that her national spirit is 
invincible, her national resources inexhaustible, and that 
her irresistible will to conquer and to rescue freedom 
and civilization for all the world from this terrible con- 
test, is absolutely sure to win. 

All America is vastly indebted to Mrs. Ward for her 
triumphant success in proving that England has done 
her best and for making this great story so clear. 



PREFACE xxix 

In this introduction, too hastily prepared for want of 
time, which is really little better than a synopsis of the 
book itself, I have not hesitated to use her own lan- 
guage from beginning to end, as the clearest by which 
to express and condense her narrative, and with oc- 
casional indications by quotation marks. 

I still believe absolutely that nine-tenths of my coun- 
trymen are in earnest sympathy with the Allies and are 
confident of their final and complete success. 

Joseph H. Choate. 
New York, May 19th, 1916. 



Author's Foreword 

This little book was the outcome of an urgent call from 
America sent by various friends whose whole sympathy 
is with the Allies. I have done my best to meet it, in 
four strenuous months, during which the British Gov- 
ernment has given me every possible facility. But such 
work has to be done rapidly, and despatched rapidly. 
I beg my friends, and England's friends, beyond the 
Atlantic, to excuse its defects. I can honestly say, 
however, that I have done my best to get at the facts, 
and that everything which is here put forward rests 
upon independent enquiry, so far as the limit of time 
allowed. 

Mary A. Ward. 

May 2, 1916. 



England's Effort 






ENGLAND'S EFFORT 
I 

Dear H. 

Your letter has found me in the midst of 
work quite unconnected with this hideous war 
in which for the last eighteen months we in 
England have lived and moved and had our 
being. My literary profession, indeed, has 
been to me, as to others, since August 4th, 
1914, something to be interposed for a short 
time, day by day, between a mind tormented 
and obsessed by the spectacle of war and the 
terrible reality it could not otherwise forget. 
To take up one's pen and lose oneself for a 
while in memories of life as it was long, long 
before the war — there was refreshment and re- 
newal in that! Once — last spring — I tried to 
base a novel on a striking war incident which 
had come my way. Impossible! The zest 
and pleasure which for any story-teller goes 
with the first shaping of a story died away at 
the very beginning. For the day's respite had 

3 



4 ENGLAND'S EFFORT 

gone. The little "wind-warm" space had dis- 
appeared. Life and thought were all given up, 
without mercy or relief, to the fever and night- 
mare of the war. I fell back upon my early 
recollections of Oxford thirty, forty years ago 
— and it was like rain in the desert. So that, 
in the course of months it had become a habit 
with me never to write about the war; and 
outside the hours of writing to think and talk 
of nothing else. 

But your letter suddenly roused in me a de- 
sire to write about the war. It was partly I 
think because what you wrote summed up and 
drove home other criticisms and appeals of 
the same kind. I had been putting them me- 
chanically aside as not having any special 
reference to me; but in reality they had 
haunted me. And now you make a personal 
appeal. You say that England at the present 
moment is misunderstood, and even hardly 
judged in America, and that even those great 
newspapers of yours that are most friendly to 
the Allies are often melancholy reading for 
those with English sympathies. Our mistakes 
— real and supposed — loom so large. We are 
thought to be not taking the war seriously — 
even now. Drunkenness, strikes, difficulties in 
recruiting the new armies, the losses of the 



ENGLAND'S EFFORT 5 

Dardanelles expedition, the failure to save 
Servia and Montenegro, tales of luxurious ex- 
penditure in the private life of rich and poor, 
and of waste or incompetence in military ad- 
ministration — these are made much of, even 
by our friends, who grieve, while our enemies 
mock. You say the French case has been on 
the whole much better presented in America 
than the English case; and you compare the 
international situation with those months in 
1863 when it was necessary for the Lincoln 
Government to make strenuous efforts to in- 
fluence and affect English opinion, which in 
the case of our upper classes and too many of 
our leading men, was unfavourable or sceptical 
towards the North. You, who know something 
of the vastness of the English effort — you 
urge upon me that English writers whose work 
and names are familiar to the American public, 
are bound to speak for their country, bound to 
try and make Americans feel what we here feel 
through every nerve — that cumulative force of 
a great nation, which has been slow to rouse, 
and is now immovably — irrevocably — set upon 
its purpose. "Tell me," you say in effect, 
"what in your belief is the real spirit of your 
people — of your men in the field and at sea, 
of your workmen and employers at home, your 



6 ENGLAND'S EFFORT 

women, your factory workers, your soldiers' 
wives, your women of the richer and educated 
classes, your landowners and politicians. Are 
you yet fully awake — yet fully in earnest, in 
this crisis of England's fate? 'Weary Titan' 
that she is, with her age-long history behind 
her, and her vast responsibilities by sea and 
land, is she shouldering her load in this in- 
credible war, as she must shoulder it; as her 
friends — the friends of liberty throughout the 
world — pray that she may shoulder it?" 

Yes! — I must answer your questions — to 
the best of my power. I am no practised jour- 
nalist — the days of my last articles for The 
Pall Mall under John Morley are thirty odd 
years behind me ! But I have some qualifica- 
tions. Ever since — more than half a century 
ago — I paid my first childish visit to the House 
of Commons, and heard Mr. Roebuck, the 
"Tear 'em" of Punch's cartoon, make his vio- 
lent appeal to the English Government to rec- 
ognise the belligerency of the South, politics 
and affairs have been no less interesting to me 
than literature; and next to English politics, 
American politics and American opinion ; partly 
because of my early association with men like 
W. E. Forster, stanch believers, even when 
Gladstone and John Russell wavered, in the 



ENGLAND'S EFFORT 7 

greatness of the American future and the jus- 
tice of the Northern cause — and partly be- 
cause of the warm and deep impression left 
upon me and mine by your successive Am- 
bassadors in London, by Mr. Lowell above all, 
by Mr. and Mrs. Phelps, by the John Hays 
and the Bayards — no less than by the many 
intimate friendships with Americans from dif- 
ferent worlds which my books have brought 
me since 1888. During the last thirty years, 
also, I have had many friends — and some kins- 
men — among the leaders of English politics, 
and in both political parties. At the present 
moment my only son is a member of the Eng- 
lish House of Commons, and a soldier fighting 
in the war. All my younger kinsfolk are fight- 
ing; the sons of all my friends are fighting; 
and their daughters are nursing as members 
of Voluntary Aid Detachments — (marvellous 
what the girl V. A. D.'s, as England affection- 
ately calls them, have done since the beginning 
of the war!) — or working week-end shifts to 
relieve munition workers, or replacing men of 
military age in the public offices and banks. I 
live in one of the Home Counties, within five 
miles of one of the military camps. The small 
towns near us are crowded with soldiers; the 
roads are full of marching infantry, of ar- 



8 ENGLAND'S EFFORT 

tillery-trains and supply-wagons. Our village 
has sent practically all its able-bodied men of 
military age to the front; the few that remain 
are "attested" and only waiting to be called 
up. A great movement, in which this house- 
hold is engaged, is now beginning to put 
women on the land, and so replace the agri- 
cultural labourers who have gone either into 
the armies or the munition factories. And 
meanwhile all the elderly men and women of 
the countryside are sitting on War Committees, 
or working for the Red Cross. Our lives are 
penetrated by the war; our thoughts are never 
free from it. 

But in trying to answer your questions I 
have gone far beyond my own normal experi- 
ence. I asked the English Government to give 
me some special opportunities of seeing what 
England is doing in the war, and in matters 
connected with the war, and they have given 
them ungrudgingly. I have been allowed to 
go, through the snow-storms of this bitter 
winter, to the far north and visit the Fleet, in 
those distant waters where it keeps guard 
night and day over England. I have spent 
some weeks in the Midlands and the north 
watching the vast new activity of the Ministry 
of Munitions throughout the country; and fin- 



ENGLAND'S EFFORT 9 

ally in a motor tour of some five hundred miles 
through the zone of the English armies in 
France, I have been a spectator not only of 
that marvellous organisation in northwestern 
France, of supplies, reinforcements, training 
camps and hospitals, which England has built 
up in the course of eighteen months behind 
her fighting line, but I have been — on the first 
of two days — within less than a mile of the 
fighting line itself, and on a second day, from a 
Flemish hill — with a gas helmet close at hand ! 
I have been able to watch a German counter- 
attack, after a successful English advance, 
and have seen the guns flashing from the Eng- 
lish lines, and the shell-bursts on the German 
trenches along the Messines ridge; while in 
the far distance, a black and jagged ghost, the 
tower of the Cloth Hall of Ypres broke fit- 
fully through the mists — bearing mute wit- 
ness before God and man. 

For a woman — a marvellous experience! I 
hope later on in these letters to describe some 
of its details, and some of the thoughts awak- 
ened by them in a woman's mind. But let 
me here keep to the main point raised by 
your question — the effort of England. During 
these two months of strenuous looking and 
thinking, of conversation with soldiers and 



10 ENGLAND'S EFFORT 

sailors and munition workers, of long days 
spent in the great supply bases across the 
Channel, or of motoring through the snowy 
roads of Normandy and Picardy, I have natur- 
ally realised that effort far more vividly than 
ever before. It seems to me — it must seem to 
any one who has seriously attempted to gauge 
it — amazing, colossal. "What country has 
ever raised over sixty per cent of its total re- 
cruitable strength, for service beyond the seas 
in a few months?" asks one of our younger 
historians; and that a country not invaded, 
protected by the sea, and by a supreme fleet; 
a country, moreover, without any form of 
compulsory military service, in which soldier- 
ing and the soldier have been rather unpopu- 
lar than popular, a country in love with peace, 
and with no intention or expectation of going 
to war with any one ? 

II 

For there we come to the root of everything 
— the unpreparedness of England — and what 
it meant. It meant simply that as a nation 
we never wished for war with Germany, and, 
as a nation, we never expected it. Our Gov- 
ernments, of course, contained men who saw 



ENGLAND'S EFFORT 11 

more or less plainly the dangers ahead, and had 
spent years of effort in trying to avoid them. 
On several occasions, during the last twenty 
years, as we all remember, a wave of sudden 
anxiety as to German aims and intentions had 
spread through the thinking portion of the 
nation — in connection with South Africa, with 
Morocco, with the Balkans. But it had always 
died away again. We know now that Germany 
was not yet ready ! Meanwhile fruitless efforts 
were made by successive English Governments 
to limit armaments, to promote arbitration, 
and extend the scope of the Hague Tribunal. 
In vain. Germany would have none of them. 
Year by year, in a world of peace her battle- 
navy grew. "For what can it be intended but 
to attack England?" said the alarmists. But 
how few of us believed them ! Our Tariff Re- 
formers protested against the encroachments 
of German trade; but, outside a handful of 
fanatics, the emphasis lay always on care for 
our own people, and not on hostility to Ger- 
many. Those who warned us passionately 
that Germany meant to provoke a struggle, 
that the struggle must come, were very little 
heeded. Nobody slept the worse at night for 
their harangues. Lord Roberts's agitation 
for National Service, based on the portentous 



12 ENGLAND'S EFFORT 

growth of the German Army and Navy, made 
comparatively little way. I speak from per- 
sonal experience of a large Parliamentary di- 
vision. "Did you foresee it?" I said to one of 
the ablest and most rising men in the Navy a 
fortnight ago. He thought a little. "I always 
felt there might be a clash over some colonial 
question — a quarrel about black men. But a 
war between the white nations over a Euro- 
pean question — that Germany would force 
such a war — no, that I never believed !" Nor 
did any of us — except those few — those very 
few persons, who Cassandra-like, saw the com- 
ing horror plainly, and spoke to a deaf country. 
"There was no hatred of Germany in this 
country" — I quote a Cabinet Minister. "Even 
in those parts of the country which had most 
reason to feel the trade rivalry of Germany, 
there was no thought of war, no wish for war !" 
It came upon England like one of those sud- 
den spates through mountain clefts in spring, 
that fall with havoc on the plains beneath. 
After such days of wrestling for European 
peace as have left their indelible mark upon 
every member of the English Cabinet which 
declared war on August 4th, 1914, we fought 
because we must, because, in Luther's words, 
we "could no other." 



ENGLAND'S EFFORT 13 

What is the proof of this — the proof which 
history will accept as final — against the vain 
and lying pleas of Germany ? 

Nothing less than the whole history of the 
past eighteen months! — beginning with that 
initial lack of realisation, and those harassing 
difficulties of organisation with which we are 
now so often and so ignorantly reproached. 
At the word "Belgium" on August 4th, prac- 
tically the whole English nation fell into line. 
We felt no doubts — we knew what we had to 
do. But the problem was how to do it. Out- 
side the Navy and the Expeditionary Force, 
both of them ready to the last gun and button, 
we had neither men nor equipment equal to 
the fighting of a Continental war, and we knew 
it. The fact is more than our justification — 
it is our glory. If we had meant war, as Ger- 
many still hoarsely but more faintly says, 
week after week, to a world that listens no 
longer, could any nation of sane men have be- 
haved as we did in the years before the war? 
— 233,000 men on active service — and 263,000 
Territorials, against Germany's millions ! — 
with arsenals and equipment to match. Is it 
any wonder that the country — our untouched, 
uninvaded country — safe as it believed itself 
to be under the protection of its supreme Navy, 



14 ENGLAND'S EFFORT 

was, in some sections of our population at any 
rate, slow to realise the enormous task to 
which — for the faith of treaties' sake, for self- 
defence's sake, it was committed? 

And yet — was it after all so slow? The 
day after war was declared the Prime Min- 
ister asked Parliament to authorise the ad- 
dition of half a million of men to the Army, 
and a first war credit of a hundred millions of 
money (five hundred million dollars). The 
first hundred thousand men came, rolling up, 
into the great military centres within a few 
days. By September 4th nearly three hundred 
thousand fresh men had enlisted — by Christ- 
mas half a million. By May, a million men 
had been added to the new Armies ; by Septem- 
ber, 1915, Sir John French alone had under 
his command close on a million men on the 
lines in France and Flanders, and in December, 
1915, the addition of another million men to 
the Army was voted by Parliament, bringing 
up the British military strength to approxi- 
mately four millions, excluding Colonials. And 
what of the Dominions ? By November, 1915, 
Canada and Australia alone had sent us forces 
more than equal to the whole of that original 
Expeditionary Force, that "contemptible little 
army" which, broken and decimated as it was 



ENGLAND'S EFFORT 15 

by the weight and fierceness of the German ad- 
vance, held the gates of the Channel till Eng- 
land could fling her fresh troops into the field, 
and France — admirable France ! — had recov- 
ered from the first onslaught of her terrible 
and ruthless enemy. 

In one of my later letters I hope to give some 
particulars of this first rush of men, gathered 
from those who witnessed it and took part in it. 
One remarkable point in connection with it is 
that those districts most heavily employed in 
munition-making and coal-mining, the two in- 
dustries absolutely indispensable to our Army 
and Navy, have also sent the largest supply of 
men to the fighting line — take, for instance, 
Newcastle and the Clyde. There have been 
anxious episodes, of course, in the great de- 
velopment. Was your own vast levy in the 
Civil War without them? And for the last 
half million men, we have had to resort, as 
Lincoln resorted, to a modified form of com- 
pulsion. There was, no doubt, a good deal of 
unnecessary waste and overlapping in the first 
camp and billeting organisation of the enor- 
mous forces raised. But when all is said, did 
we not, in the language of a French observer 
"improvise the impossible"? — and have we 
not good reason to be proud? — not with any 



16 ENGLAND'S EFFORT 

foolish vainglory, but with the sober and res- 
olute pride of a great nation, conscious of its 
past, determined to correct its mistakes, and 
looking open-eyed and fearless towards the 
future ? 

Then as to munitions: in many ways, as 
you will perhaps say, and as I agree, a tragic 
story. If we had possessed last spring the 
ammunition — both for ourselves and our allies 
we now possess, the war would have gone dif- 
ferently. Drunkenness, trade-union difficul- 
ties, a small — very small — revolutionary ele- 
ment among our work people — all these have 
made trouble. But the real cause of our 
shortage lay in the fact that no one, outside 
Germany, realised till far into the war, what 
the ammunition needs — the absolutely un- 
precedented needs — of this struggle were going 
to be. It was the second Battle of Ypres at 
the end of April last year which burnt them 
into the English mind. We paid for the 
grim knowledge in thousands of our noblest 
lives. But since then? 

In a later letter I propose to draw some pic- 
ture in detail of the really marvellous move- 
ment which since last July, under the impulse 
given by Mr. Lloyd George, has covered Eng- 
land with new munition factories and added 



ENGLAND'S EFFORT 17 

enormously to the producing power of the old 
and famous firms, has drawn in an army of 
women — now reckoned at something over a 
quarter of a million — and is at this moment 
not only providing amply for our own armies, 
but is helping those of the Allies against those 
final days of settlement with Germany which 
we believe to be now steadily approaching. 
American industry and enterprise have helped 
us substantially in this field of munitions. We 
are gratefully conscious of it. But England 
is now fast overtaking her own needs. 

More of this presently. Meanwhile to the 
military and equipment effort of the country, 
you have to add the financial effort — some- 
thing like $7,500,000,000, already expended 
on the war; the organising effort, exemplified 
in the wonderful "back of the army" in 
France, which I hope to describe to you; and 
the vast hospital organisation, with all its sci- 
entific adjuncts, and its constantly advancing 
efficiency. 

And at the foundation of it all — the human 
and personal effort! — the lives given for Eng- 
land, the blood so generously shed for her, the 
homes that have sacrificed their all, our 
"golden lads" from all quarters and classes, 
whose young bodies lie mingled with an alien 



18 ENGLAND'S EFFORT 

dust that "is for ever England," since they 
sleep there and hallow it; our mothers who 
mourn the death or the wreck of the splen- 
did sons they reared; our widowed wives and 
fatherless children. And this, in a quarrel 
which only very slowly our people have come 
to feel as in very deed their own. At first we 
thought most often and most vividly of Bel- 
gium, of the broken treaty, and of France, so 
wantonly attacked, whose people no English 
man or woman could ever have looked in the 
face again, had we forsaken her. Then came 
the hammer blows that forged our will — Lou- 
vain, Aerschot, Rheims, the air-raids on our 
defenceless towns, the senseless murder of our 
women and children, the Bryce report, the 
Lusitania, the execution of Edith Cavell — the 
whole stupefying revelation of the German 
hatred and greed towards this country, and of 
the qualities latent in the German character. 
Now we know — that it is they, or we — since 
they willed it so. And this old, illogical, un- 
ready country is only just arriving at its full 
strength, only just fully conscious of the stern- 
ness of its own resolve, only just putting out 
its full powers, as the German power is weak- 
ening, and the omens are changing — both in 
East and West. 



ENGLAND'S EFFORT 19 

III 

No ! — the effort of England during the past 
eighteen months in spite of all temporary ebbs 
and difficulties, in spite of that chorus of self- 
blame in which the English nation delights, 
has been one of the great things in the history 
of our country. We have "improvised the 
impossible" in every direction — but one. 

In one point, indeed, there has been no im- 
provisation. Nothing was trusted to chance. 
What is it that alone has secured us the time 
to make the effort we have made ? 

It is now about a month ago that, by per- 
mission of the Admiralty, I found myself 
driving towards a certain pier in a harbour 
opening on the North Sea. The Commodore 
of a Cruiser Squadron was to send his boat 
for me, and I was to lunch with him on board 
his Flag-ship. I duly passed the distrustful 
sentry on the road leading to the pier, arrived 
at the pier-head and descended from the mo- 
tor which had brought me. The morning was 
mistily sunny, and the pier strangely deserted. 
Where was the boat? Where was my friend 
who had hoped to come for me himself? No 
signs of either. The few old sailors employed 
about the pier looked at me in astonishment, 



20 ENGLAND'S EFFORT 

and shook their heads when I inquired. Com- 
modore 's boat was not there; no boat 

had been in that morning from the ships. I 
took the Commodore's letter from my hand- 
bag, to assure myself I had not been dream- 
ing, and reread it in perplexity. No dates 
could be clearer — no directions more precise. 
Suddenly I perceive one tall naval officer on 
the pier. "Can you help me, sir?" And I 
hand him the Commodore's letter. He looks 
at me — and at the letter. His face twinkles 
with repressed laughter; and I laugh, too, 
beginning to understand. "Very sorry," says 
the charming young man, "but I think I can 
assure you there will be no boat, and it is no 

use your waiting. Commodore went to 

sea last night." 

I thanked him, and we laughed together. 
Then I walked up the pier a little way, seeing 
a movement in the mist. A sailor came up to 
me. "They all went to sea last night," he said 
in my ear — "and there are the slow ones com- 
ing back!" And out of the mist came the 
black shapes of war-ships, moving majesti- 
cally up the harbour — one might have fancied, 
with a kind of injured dignity, because their 
unreasonable fellows had been faster and had 
gone farther afield than they. 



ENGLAND'S EFFORT 21 

I walked back to my motor, disappointed 
indeed, and yet exulting. It was good to real- 
ise personally through this small incident, the 
mobility and ever-readiness of the Fleet — the 
absolute insignificance — non-existence even — 
of any civilian or shore interest, for the Navy 
at its work. It was not till a week later that 
I received an amusing and mysterious line 

from Commodore , the most courteous 

of men. 

IV 

By the time it reached me, however, I was 
on the shores of a harbour in the far north 
"visiting the Fleet," indeed, and on the invi- 
tation of England's most famous sailor. Let 
me be quite modest about it. Not for me the 
rough waters, or the thunderous gun-prac- 
tice — 

"Breaking the silence of the seas 
Among the farthest Hebrides" — 

which I see described in the letters of the Rus- 
sian or American journalists who have been 
allowed to visit the Grand Fleet. There had 
been some talk, I understand, of sending me 
out in a destroyer; it was mercifully aban- 
doned. All the same, I must firmly put on 



22 ENGLAND'S EFFORT 

record that mine was "a visit to the Fleet," 
by Admiralty permission, for the purpose of 
these letters to you, and through you to the 
American public, and that so far no other 
woman writer has been allowed within those 
mysterious northern limits where I spent two 
wonderful days. 

It was, indeed, a wintry visit. The whole 
land was covered with snow. The train could 
hardly drag itself through the choked High- 
land defiles; and it was hours behind its time 
when we arrived at a long-expected station, 
and a Vice- Admiral looking at me with friendly, 
keen eyes came to the carriage to greet me. 
"My boat shall meet you at the pier with 
my Flag-Lieutenant to-morrow morning. You 
will pick me up at the Flag-ship, and I will 
take you round the Fleet. You will lunch 
with me, I hope, afterwards." I tried to show 
my grateful sense both of the interest and the 
humour of the situation. My kind visitor dis- 
appeared, and the train carried me on a few 
miles farther to my destination for the night. 

And here I take a few words from a journal 
written at the time: 

It is nearly dawn. A red light in the northeast is coming 
up over the snowy hills. The water, steely grey — the tide 
rising. What strange moving bodies are those, scudding along 



ENGLAND'S EFFORT 23 

over the dim surface, like the ghosts of sea planes? Dense 
flocks of duck apparently, rising and falling along the shal- 
lows of the shore. Now they are gone. Nothing moves. The 
morning is calm, and the water still. And on it lie, first a 
cruiser squadron, and then a line of Dreadnoughts stretching 
out of sight. No lights anywhere, except the green lights on 
a hospital ship far away. The great ships lie dark and silent, 
and I sit and watch them, in the cold dawn, thinking that but 
for them, and the multitude of their comrades that guard these 
seas and shores, England would be as Belgium or as Northern 
France, ravaged and destroyed by a barbarian enemy. My 
heart goes out to you, great ships, and you, gallant unwearied 
men, who keep your watch upon them ! That watch has been 
kept for generations. Never has there been such need for it 
as now. . . . 



But the day has risen, and the sun with it. 
As I leave the shore in the Vice-Admiral's 
boat, the sunlight comes dancing over a low 
line of hill, lighting up the harbour, the mighty 
ships, with their guns, and, scattered out to 
sea along the distance, the destroyers, the 
trawlers, the mine-sweepers, the small auxil- 
iary craft of all kinds — those "fringes of the 
fleet" — which Kipling has caught and photo- 
graphed as none but he can. 

The barge stops beside the Flag-ship, and the 
Admiral descends into it. What is the stamp, 
the peculiar stamp that these naval men 
bear? — as of a force trained and disciplined 
to its utmost capacity, and then held lightly 



24 ENGLAND'S EFFORT 

in check — till wanted. You see it in so many 
of their faces, even in eyes hollow for want of 
sleep. It is always there — the same strength, 
the same self-control, the same humanity. Is 
it produced by the testing weight of responsi- 
bility, the silent sense of ever-present danger, 
both from the forces of nature and the enmity 
of man, the high, scientific training, and last 
but not least, that marvellous comradeship of 
the Navy, whether between officer and officer, 
or between officers and men, which is con- 
stantly present indeed in the Army, but is 
necessarily closer and more intimate here, in 
the confined world of the ship, where all live 
together day after day, and week after week, 
and where — if disaster comes — all may perish 
together ? 

But on this bright winter morning, as we 
pass under and round the ships, and the Ad- 
miral points out what a landswoman can 
understand, in the equipment and the power 
of these famous monsters with their pointing 
guns, there was for the moment no thought 
of the perils of the Navy, but only of the glory 
of it. And afterwards in the Admiral's pleas- 
ant drawing-room on board the Flag-ship, with 
its gathering of naval officers, Admirals, Cap- 
tains, Commanders, how good the talk was ! 



ENGLAND'S EFFORT 25 

Not a shade of boasting — no mere abuse of 
Germany — rather a quiet regret for the days 
when German and English naval men were 
friends throughout the harbours of the world. 
"Von Spee was a very good fellow — I knew 
him well — and his two sons who went down 
with him/' says an Admiral gently. "I was 
at Kiel the month before the war. I know 
that many of their men must loathe the work 
they are set to do." "The point is," says a 
younger man, broad-shouldered, with the 
strong face of a leader, "that they are always 
fouling the seas, and we are always cleaning 
them up. Let the neutrals understand that ! 
It is not we who strew the open waters with 
mines for the slaughter of any passing ship, 
and then call it 'maintaining the freedom of 
the seas.' And as to their general strategy, 
their Higher Command — " he throws back his 
head with a quiet laugh — and I listen to a 
rapid sketch of what the Germans might have 
done, have never done, and what it is now 
much too late to do, which I will not re- 
peat. 

Type after type comes back to me: — the 
courteous Flag-Lieutenant, who is always 
looking after his Admiral, whether in these 
brief harbour rests, or in the clash and dark- 



26 ENGLAND'S EFFORT 

ness of the high seas — the Lieutenant-Com- 
manders whose destroyers are the watch-dogs, 
the ceaseless protectors, no less than the eyes 
and ears of the Fleet — the Flag-Captain, who 
takes me through the great ship, with his 
vigilant, spare face, and his understanding, 
kindly talk about his men; many of whom 
on this Thursday afternoon — the quasi half- 
holiday of the Fleet when in harbour — are 
snatching an hour's sleep when and where 
they can. That sleep-abstinence of the Navy 
— sleep, controlled, measured out, reduced to 
a bare minimum, among thousands of men, 
that we on shore may sleep our fill — look at 
the signs of it, in the eyes both of these offi- 
cers, and of the sailors crowding the "liberty" 
boats, which are just bringing them back from 
their short two hours' leave on shore ! 

Another gathering, in the Captain's room, 
for tea. The talk turns on a certain popular 
play dealing with naval life, and a Comman- 
der describes how the manuscript of it had 
been brought to him, and how he had revelled 
in the cutting out of all the sentimentalisms. 
Two men in the play — friends — going into 
action — shake hands with each other "with 
tears in their eyes." A shout of derisive laugh- 
ter goes up from the tea-table. But they ad- 



ENGLAND'S EFFORT 27 

mit "talking shop" off duty. "That's the 
difference between us and the Army." And 
what shop it is ! I listen to two young officers, 
both commanding destroyers, describing — one, 
his adventures in dirty weather the night be- 
fore, on patrol duty. "My hat, I thought 
one moment the ship was on the rocks ! You 
couldn't see a yard for the snow — and the sea 
—beastly!" The other had been on one of Ad- 
miral Hood's monitors, when they suddenly 
loomed out of the mist on the Belgian coast, 
and the German army marching along the 
coast road to Dunkirk and Calais marched no 
more, but lay in broken fragments behind the 
dunes, or any shelter available, till the flood- 
ing of the dikes farther south completed the 
hopeless defeat which Admiral Hood's guns 
had begun. 

Then the talk ranges round the blockade, 
the difficulties and dangers of patrol work, 
the complaints of neutrals. "America should 
understand us. Their blockade hit us hard 
enough in the Civil War. And we are fight- 
ing for their ideals no less than our own. 
When has our naval supremacy ever hurt 
them? Mayn't they be glad of it some day? 
What about a fellow called Monroe!" — so it 
runs. Then its tone changes insensibly. From 



28 ENGLAND'S EFFORT 

a few words dropped I realise with a start 
where these pleasantly chatting men had 
probably been only two or three days before, 
where they would probably be again on the 
morrow. Some one opens a map, and I listen 
to talk which, in spite of its official reticence, 
throws many a light on the vast range of Eng- 
land's naval power, and the number of her 
ships. "Will they come out? When will they 
come out?" The question runs round the 
group. Some one tells a story of a German 
naval prisoner taken not long ago in the North 
Sea, and of his remark to his captors: "Yes, 
we're beaten — we know that — but we'll make 
it hell for you before we give in !" 

For that final clash — that Armageddon that 
all think must come, our sailors wait, not de- 
spising their enemy, knowing very well that 
they — the Fleet — are the pivot of the situa- 
tion, that without the British Navy, not all 
the valour of the Allies in France or Russia 
could win the war, and that with it, Germany's 
hope of victory is vain. While the Navy 
lives, England lives, and Germany's vision of 
a world governed by the ruthless will of the 
scientific soldier is doomed. 

Meanwhile, what has Germany been doing 
in her shipyards all this time ? No one knows, 



ENGLAND'S EFFORT 29 

but my hosts are well aware that we shall 
know some day. 

As to England — here is Mr. Balfour mov- 
ing the Naval Estimates in the House of Com- 
mons — the "token votes" which tell nothing 
that should not be told. But since the war be- 
gan, says the First Lord, we have added "one 
million" to the tonnage of the Navy, and we 
have doubled its personnel. We are add- 
ing more every day; for the Admiralty are 
always "wanting more." We are quite con- 
scious of our defects — in the Air Service first 
and foremost. But they will be supplied. 
There is a mighty movement afoot in the work- 
shops of England — an effort which, when all 
drawbacks are allowed for, has behind it a 
free people's will. 

In my next letter I propose to take you 
through some of these workshops. "We get 
the most extraordinary letters from Ameri- 
ca," WTites one of my correspondents, a steel 
manufacturer in the Midlands. "What do 
they think we are about?" An American let- 
ter is quoted. "So you are still, in England, 
taking the war lying down?" 

Are we? Let us see. 



II 

Dear H. 

In this second letter I am to try and prove 
to you that England is not taking the war 
"lying down." 

Let me then give you some account — an 
eye-witness's account — of- what there is now 
to be seen by the ordinary intelligent observer 
in the "Munition Areas," as the public had 
learned to call them, of England and Scotland. 
That great spectacle, as it exists to-day — so 
inspiring in what it immediately suggests of 
human energy and human ingenuity, so ap- 
palling in its wider implications — testifies, in 
the first instance, to the fierce stiffening of 
England's resolve to win the war, and to win 
it at a lessened cost in life and suffering to our 
men in the field, which ran through the na- 
tion, after the second Battle of Ypres, towards 
the close of April, 1915. That battle, together 
with the disagreement between Mr. Winston 
Churchill and Lord Fisher at the Admiralty, 
had, as we all know, momentous consequences. 
The two events brought the national dissatis- 

30 



ENGLAND'S EFFORT 31 

faction and disappointment with the general 
course of the spring fighting to a head. By 
May 19 the Ministry, which had declared the 
war and so far conducted it, had disappeared; 
a National or Coalition Ministry drawn from 
the leading men of both parties reigned in its 
stead. The statement made by Mr. Asquith, 
as late, alack, as April 20th, that there was 
"no truth in the statement" that our efforts 
at the front "were being crippled or at any 
rate hampered" by want of ammunition, was 
seen almost immediately, in the bitter light of 
events, to be due to some fatal misconceptions, 
or misjudgments, on the part of those inform- 
ing the Prime Minister, which the nation in its 
own interests and those of its allies, could only 
peremptorily sweep away. A new Ministry 
was created — the Ministry of Munitions, and 
Mr. Lloyd George was placed at its head. 

The work that Mr. Lloyd George and his 
Ministry — now employing vast new buildings, 
and a staff running into thousands — have 
done since June, 1915, is nothing less than 
colossal. Much no doubt had been done 
earlier for which the new Ministry has perhaps 
unjustly got the credit, and not all has been 
smooth sailing since. One hears, of course, 
criticism and complaints. What vast and ef- 



32 ENGLAND'S EFFORT 

fective stir, for a great end, was ever made in 
the world without them? 

Mr. Lloyd George has incurred a certain 
amount of unpopularity among the working 
classes, who formerly adored him. In my 
belief he has incurred it for the country's sake, 
and those sections of the working class who 
have smarted under his criticisms most bitterly 
will forgive him when the time comes. In his 
passionate determination to get the thing done, 
he has sometimes let his theme — of the national 
need, and the insignificance of all things else 
in comparison with it — carry him into a vehe- 
mence which the workmen have resented, and 
which foreign or neutral countries have mis- 
understood. 

He found in his path, which was also the 
nation's path, three great foes — drunkenness, 
the old envenomed quarrel between employer 
and employed, and that deep-rooted industrial 
conservatism of England, which shows itself on 
the one hand in the trade-union customs and 
restrictions of the working class, built up, as 
they hold, through long years, for the protec- 
tion of their own standards of life, and, on the 
other, in the slowness of many of the smaller 
English employers (I am astonished, however, 
at the notable exceptions everywhere !) to 



ENGLAND'S EFFORT 33 

realise new needs and processes, and to adapt 
themselves to them. Could any one have 
made such an omelet without breaking a great 
many eggs? Is it wonderful that the em- 
ployers have sometimes felt themselves un- 
bearably hustled, sometimes misunderstood, 
and at other times annoyed, or worried by 
what seems to them the red tape of the new 
Ministry, and its apparent multiplicity of 
forms and inquiries? 

Men accustomed to conduct their own busi- 
nesses with the usual independence of regula- 
tion have been obliged to submit to regulation. 
Workmen accustomed to defend certain meth- 
ods of work and certain customs of their trade 
as matters of life and death have had to see 
them jeopardised or swept away. The resto- 
ration of these methods and customs is solemnly 
promised them after the war; but meanwhile 
they become the servants of a public depart- 
ment almost as much under orders as the sol- 
dier himself. They are asked to admit un- 
skilled men to the skilled processes over which 
they have long kept so jealous a guard; above 
all, they are asked to assent wholesale to the 
employment of women in trades where women 
have never been employed before, where it is 
obvious that their introduction taps an im- 



34 ENGLAND'S EFFORT 

mense reservoir of new labour, and equally 
obvious that, once let in, they are not going to 
be easily or wholly dislodged. 

Of course, there has been friction and diffi- 
culty; nor is it all yet at an end. In the few 
danger-spots of the country, where heads are 
hottest, where thousands of the men of most 
natural weight and influence are away fighting, 
and where among a small minority hatred of 
the capitalist deadens national feeling and ob- 
scures the national danger, there have been 
anxious moments during the winter; there may 
possibly be some anxious moments again. 

But, after all, how little it amounts to in 
comparison with the enormous achievement! 
It took us nine months to realise what France — 
which, remember, is a Continental nation un- 
der conscription — had realised after the Battle 
of the Marne, when she set every hand in the 
country to work at munitions that could be set 
to work. With us, whose villages were un- 
ravaged, whose normal life was untouched, 
realisation was inevitably slower. Again we 
were unprepared, and again, as in the case of 
the Army itself, we may plead that we have 
"improvised the impossible." "No nation," 
says Mr. Buchan, "can be adequately prepared, 
unless, like Germany, it intends war; and 



ENGLAND'S EFFORT 35 

Britain, like France, paid the penalty of her 
honest desire for peace!" 

Moreover, we had our Navy to work for, 
without which the cause of the Allies would 
have gone under, must have gone under, at the 
first shock of Germany. What the workmen 
of England did in the first year of the war in 
her docks and shipyards, history will tell some 
day. 

"What's wrong with the men!" cried a 
Glasgow employer indignantly to me, one eve- 
ning as, quite unknown the one to the other, 
we were nearing one of the towns on the Clyde. 
"What was done on the Clyde, in the first 
months of the war, should never be forgotten 
by this country. Working from six to nine 
every day till they dropped with fatigue — and 
Sundays, too — drinking just to keep them- 
selves going — too tired to eat or sleep — that's 
what it was — I saw it !" 

I, too, have seen that utter fatigue stamped 
on a certain percentage of faces through the 
Midlands, or the districts of the Tyne and the 
Clyde — fatigue which is yet indomitable, which 
never gives way. How fresh, beside that look, 
are the faces of the women, for whom workshop 
life is new! In its presence one forgets all 
hostile criticism, all talk of strikes and drink, 



36 ENGLAND'S EFFORT 

of trade-union difficulties, and the endless wor- 
ries of the employers. 

The English workman is not tractable mate- 
rial — far from it — and he is not imaginative; 
except in the persons of some of his chosen 
leaders, he has never seen a ruined French or 
Flemish village, and he was slow to realise the 
bitterness of that silence of the guns on the 
front, when ammunition runs short, and lives 
must pay. But he has sent his hundreds of 
thousands to the fighting line; there are a 
million and a half of him now working at muni- 
tions, and it is he, in a comradeship with the 
brain workers, the scientific intelligence of the 
nation, closer than any he has yet known, and 
lately, with the new and astonishing help of 
women — it is he, after all, who is "delivering 
the goods," he who is now piling the great 
arsenals and private works with guns and 
shells, with bombs, rifles, and machine-guns, 
he who is working night and day in the ship- 
yards, he who is teaching the rising army of 
women their work, and making new and firm 
friends, through the national emergency, 
whether in the trenches or the workshops, with 
other classes and types in the nation, hitherto 
little known to him, to whom he, too, is per- 
haps a revelation. 



ENGLAND'S EFFORT 37 

There will be a new wind blowing through 
England when this war is done. Not only- 
will the scientific intelligence, the general edu- 
cation, and the industrial plant of the nation 
have gained enormously from this huge im- 
petus of war; but men and women, employers 
and employed, shaken perforce out of their 
old grooves, will look at each other surely with 
new eyes, in a world which has not been steeped 
for nothing in effort and sacrifice, in common 
griefs and a common passion of will.'. 



II 

All-over England, then, the same quadruple 
process has now been going on for months: 

The steady enlargement of existing arma- 
ment and munition works, national or private. 

The transformation of a host of other engi- 
neering businesses into munition works. 

The co-ordination of a vast number of small 
workshops dealing with the innumerable metal 
industries of ordinary commerce, so as to make 
them feed the larger engineering works, with 
all those minor parts of the gun or shell, which 
such shops had the power to make. 

The putting up of entirely new workshops — 



38 ENGLAND'S EFFORT 

National Workshops — directly controlled by 
the new Ministry, under the Munitions Acts. 

Let me take you through a few typical 
scenes: 

It was on the day after a Zeppelin raid that 
I left a house in the north where I had been 
seeing one of the country-house convalescent 
hospitals, to which Englishwomen and Eng- 
lish wealth are giving themselves everywhere 
without stint, and made my way by train, 
through a dark and murky afternoon, to a 
Midland town. The news of the raid was so 
far vague. The newspapers of the morning 
gave no names or details. I was not aware 
that I was passing through towns where women 
and children in back streets had been cruelly 
and wantonly killed the night before, where a 
brewery had been bombed, and the windows 
of a train broken, in order that the German 
public might be fed on ridiculous lies about 
the destruction of Liverpool docks and the 
wrecking of "English industry." "English 
industry lies in ruins," said the Hamburger 
Nachrichten complacently. Marvellous paper ! 
Just after reading its remarks, I was driving 
down the streets of the great industrial centre 
I had come to see — a town which the murder- 
ers of the night before would have been glad 



ENGLAND'S EFFORT 39 

indeed to hit. As it was, "English industry" 
seemed tolerably active amid its "ruins." The 
clumsy falsehoods of the German official re- 
ports and the German newspapers affect me 
strangely! It is not so much their lack of 
truth as their lack of the ironic, the satiric 
sense, which is a certain protection, after all, 
even amid the tragedy of war. We have a 
tolerable British conceit of ourselves, no doubt, 
,and in war we make foolish or boasting state- 
ments about the future, because, in spite of all 
our grumbling, we are, at bottom, a nation of 
optimists, and apt to see things as we wish. 
But this sturdy or fatuous lying about the past 
— the "sinking" of the Lion, the "capture" of 
Fort Vaux, or the "bombardment" of Liver- 
pool docks — is really beyond us. Our sense of 
ridicule, if nothing else, forbids — the instinct 
of an old people with an old and humorous 
literature. These leading articles of the Ham- 
burger Nachrichten, the sermons of German pas- 
tors, and those amazing manifestoes of Ger- 
man professors, flying straight in the face of 
historic documents — "scraps of paper" — which 
are there, none the less, to all time — for us, 
these things are only not comic because, to the 
spiritual eye, they are written in blood. But 
to return to the "ruins," and this "English in- 



40 ENGLAND'S EFFORT 

dustry" which during the last six months has 
taken on so grim an aspect for Germany. 

My guide, an official of the Ministry, stops 
the motor, and we turn down a newly made 
road, leading towards a mass of spreading 
buildings on the left. 

"A year ago," says my companion — "this 
was all green fields. Now the company is em- 
ploying, instead of 3,500 work-people, about 
three times the number, of whom a large pro- 
portion are women. Its output has been 
quadrupled, and the experiment of introduc- 
ing women has been a complete success." 

We pass up a fine oak staircase to the new 
offices, and I am soon listening to the report 
of the works superintendent. A spare, power- 
ful man with the eyes of one in whom life 
burns fast, he leans, his hands in his pockets, 
against the wall of his office, talking easily 
and well. He himself has not had a day's 
holiday for ten months, never sleeping more 
than five and a half hours, with the telephone 
at his bedhead, and waking to instant work 
when the moment for waking comes. His 
view of his workmen is critical. It is the view 
of one consumed with "realisation," face to 
face with those who don't "realise." "But the 
raid will do a deal of good," he says cheerfully. 



ENGLAND'S EFFORT 41 

"As to the women!" — he throws up his 
hands — "they're saving the country. They 
don't mind what they do. Hours? They 
work ten and a half or, with overtime, twelve 
hours a day, seven days a week. At least, 
that's what they'd like to do. The Govern- 
ment are insisting on one Sunday — or two Sun- 
days — a month off. I don't say they're not 
right. But the women resent it. 'We're not 
tired!' they say. And you look at them! — 
they're not tired. 

"If I go down to the shed and say: c Girls ! 
— there's a bit of work the Government are 
pushing for — they say they must have — can 
you get it done?' Why, they'll stay and get 
it done, and then pour out of the works, laugh- 
ing and singing. I can tell you of a surgical- 
dressing factory near here, where for nearly a 
year the women never had a holiday. They 
simply wouldn't take one. 'And what'll our 
men at the front do, if we go holiday-making ? ' 

"Last night" (the night of the Zeppelin 
raid) "the warning came to put out lights. We 
daren't send them home. They sat in the dark 
among the machines, singing, 'Keep the home 
fires burning,' 'Tipperary,' and the like. I 
tell you, it made one a bit choky to hear 
them. They were thinking of their sweet- 



42 ENGLAND'S EFFORT 

hearts and husbands I'll be bound! — not of 
themselves." 

In another minute or two we were walking 
through the new workshops. Often as I have 
now seen this sight, so new to England, of a 
great engineering workshop filled with women, 
it stirs me at the twentieth time little less than 
it did at first. These girls and women of the 
Midlands and the north, are a young and 
comely race. Their slight or rounded figures 
among the forest of machines, the fair or 
golden hair of so many of them, their grace of 
movement, bring a strange touch of beauty 
into a scene which has already its own spell. 

Muirhead Bone and Joseph Pennell have 
shown us what can be done in art with these 
high workshops, with their intricate distances 
and the endless crisscross of their belting, and 
their ranged machines. But the coming in of 
the girls, in their close khaki caps and overalls, 
showing the many pretty heads and slender 
necks, and the rows of light bending forms, 
spaced in order beside their furnaces or lathes 
as far as the eye can reach, has added a new 
element — something flower-like, to all this flash 
of fire and steel, and to the grimness of war 
underlying it. 

For the final meaning of it all is neither soft 



ENGLAND'S EFFORT 43 

nor feminine ! These girls — at hot haste — are 
making fuses and cartridge-cases by the hun- 
dred thousand, casting, pressing, drawing, and, 
in the special danger-buildings, filling certain 
parts of the fuse with explosive. There were 
about 4,000 of them to 5,000 men, when I saw 
the shop, and their number has no doubt in- 
creased since; for the latest figures show that 
about 15,000 fresh women workers are going 
into the munition works every week. The men 
are steadily training them, and without the 
teaching and co-operation of the men — with- 
out, that is, the surrender by the men of some 
of their most cherished trade customs — the 
whole movement would have been impossi- 
ble. 

As it is, by the sheer body of work the 
women have brought in, by the deftness, en- 
ergy, and enthusiasm they throw into the sim- 
pler but quite indispensable processes, thereby 
setting the unskilled man free for the Army, 
and the skilled man for work which women 
cannot do, England has become possessed of 
new and vast resources of which she scarcely 
dreamed a year ago; and so far as this war is 
a war of machinery — and we all know what 
Germany's arsenals have done to make it 
so — its whole aspect is now changing for us. 



44 ENGLAND'S EFFORT 

The "eternal feminine" has made one more 
startling incursion upon the normal web of 
things! 

But on the " dilution" of labour, the burn- 
ing question of the hour, I shall have some- 
thing to say in my next letter. Let me record 
another visit of the same day to a small-arms 
factory of importance. Not many women 
here so far, though the number is increasing, 
but look at the expansion figures since last 
summer! A large, new factory added, on a 
bare field; 40,000 tons of excavation removed, 
two miles of new shops, sixty feet wide and 
four floors high, the output in rifles quadru- 
pled, and so on. 

We climbed to the top floor of the new 
buildings and looked far and wide over the 
town. Dotted over the tall roofs rose the 
national flags, marking "controlled" factories, 
i. e., factories still given over a year ago to one 
or other of the miscellaneous metal trades of 
the Midlands, and now making fuse or shell 
for England's Armies, and under the control 
of the English Government. One had a sud- 
den sharp sense of the town's corporate life, 
and of the spirit working in it everywhere for 
England's victory. Before we descended, we 
watched the testing of a particular gun. I was 



ENGLAND'S EFFORT 45 

to hear its note on the actual battle-field a 
month later. 

An afternoon train takes me on to another 
great town, with some very ancient institu- 
tions, which have done very modern service in 
the war. I spent my evening in talking with 
my host, a steel manufacturer identified with 
the life of the city, but serving also on one of 
the central committees of the Ministry in 
London. Labour and politics, the chances of 
the war, America and American feeling to- 
wards us, the task of the new Minister of 
Munitions, the temper of English and Scotch 
workmen, the flux into which all manufactur- 
ing conditions have been thrown by the war, 
and how far old landmarks can be restored 
after it — we talked hard on these and many 
other topics, till I must break it off — unwill- 
ingly! — to get some sleep and write some 
notes. 

Next day took me deep into the very cen- 
tral current of "England's Effort" — so far as 
this great phase of it at any rate is concerned. 
In this town, even more than in the city I had 
just left, one felt the throb of the nation's ris- 
ing power, concentrated, orderly, determined. 
Every single engineering business in a town of 
engineers was working for the war. Every 



46 ENGLAND'S EFFORT 

manufacturer of any importance was doing his 
best for the Government, some in connection 
with the new Ministry, some with the Ad- 
miralty, some with the War Office. As for 
the leading firms of the city, the record of 
growth, of a mounting energy by day and 
night, was nothing short of bewildering. Take 
these few impressions of a long day, as they 
come back to me. 

First, a great steel warehouse, full of raw 
steel of many sorts and kinds, bayonet steel, 
rifle steel, shell steel, stacked in every avail- 
able corner and against every possible wall — 
all sold, every bit of it, and ready to be shipped 
— some to the Colonies, some to our Allies, 
with peremptory orders coming in as to which 
the harassed head of the firm could only shake 
his head with a despairing "impossible!" 

Then some hours in a famous works, under 
the guidance of the manager, one of those men, 
shrewd, indefatigable, humane, in whose com- 
pany one learns what it is, in spite of all our 
supposed deficiencies, that makes the secret of 
England's industrial tenacity. An elderly 
Scotchman, very plainly marked by the labour 
and strain of the preceding eighteen months, 
but still steadily keeping his head and his 
temper, showing the signs of an Evangelical 



ENGLAND'S EFFORT 47 

tradition in his strong dislike for Sunday work, 
his evident care for his work-people — men and 
women — and his just and sympathetic tone 
towards the labour with which he has to deal 
— such is my companion. 

He has a wonderful story to tell: "In Sep- 
tember, 1914, we were called upon to manu- 
facture a large extra number of field-guns. 
We had neither buildings nor machinery for 
the order. However, we set to work. We 
took down seven dwelling-houses; in three 
weeks we were whitewashing the walls of our 
new workshop and laying in the machinery. 
My idea was to make so many guns. The 
Government asked for four times as many. 
So we took down more houses, and built an- 
other much larger shop. The work was fin- 
ished in ten weeks. Five other large work- 
shops were put up last year, all built with 
lightning speed, and everywhere additions have 
been made to the machinery in every depart- 
ment wherever it was possible to put ma- 
chines." 

As to their thousands of workmen, Mr. C. 
has no complaints to make. 

"They have been steadily working any- 
thing from 60 to 80 hours per week; the aver- 
age is 64.29 hours per week, and the average 



48 ENGLAND'S EFFORT 

time lost only 3.51 per cent. A little while 
ago, a certain union put forward a claim for 
an advance in wages. We had to decline it, 
but as the meeting came to an end, the trade- 
union secretary said: 

" 'Of course, we are disappointed, and we 
shall no doubt return to the matter again. 
But whether you concede the advance of wages 
or not, our members will continue to do their 
level best, believing that they are not only 
working for themselves, but helping the Gov- 
ernment and helping our soldiers to wage this 
war to a successful conclusion.' " 

And the manager adds his belief that this is 
the spirit which prevails "among the work- 
people generally." 

Before we plunge into the main works, 
however, my guide takes me to see a recent 
venture, organised since the war, in which he 
clearly takes a special interest. An old ware- 
house bought, so to speak, overnight, and 
equipped next morning, has been turned into 
a small workshop for shell production — employ- 
ing between three and four hundred girls, with 
the number of skilled men necessary to keep 
the new unskilled labour going. These girls 
are working on the eight hours' shift system; 
and working so well that a not uncommon 



ENGLAND'S EFFORT 49 

wage among them — on piece-work, of course — 
runs to somewhere between two and three 
pounds a week. 

"But there is much more than money in it," 
says the kind-faced woman superintendent, as 
we step into her little office out of the noise, to 
talk a little. "The girls are perfectly aware 
that they are 'doing their bit,' that they are 
standing by their men in the trenches." 

This testimony indeed is universal. There 
is patriotism in this grim work, and affection, 
and a new and honourable self-consciousness. 
Girls and women look up and smile as a visitor 
passes. They presume that he or she is there 
for some useful purpose connected with the 
war, and their expression seems to say: "Yes, 
we are all in it ! — we know very well what we 
are doing, and what a difference we are mak- 
ing. Go and tell our boys ..." 

The interest of this workshop lay, of course, 
in the fact that it was a sample of innumer- 
able others, as quickly organised and as effi- 
ciently worked, now spreading over the Mid- 
lands and the north. As to the main works 
belonging to the same great firm, such things 
have been often described; but one sees them 
to-day with new eyes, as part of a struggle 
which is one with the very life of England. 



50 ENGLAND'S EFFORT 

Acres and acres of ground covered by huge 
workshops new and old, by interlacing railway 
lines and moving trolleys. Gone is all the 
vast miscellaneous engineering work of peace. 
The war has swallowed everything. 

I have a vision of a great building, where 
huge naval guns are being lowered from the 
annealing furnace above into the hardening 
oil-tank below, or where in the depths of a 
great pit, with lights and men moving at the 
bottom, I see as I stoop over the edge, a jacket 
being shrunk upon another similar monster, 
hanging perpendicularly below me. 

Close by are the forging-shops whence come 
the howitzers and the huge naval shells. 
Watch the giant pincers that lift the red-hot 
ingots and drop them into the stamping 
presses. Man directs; but one might think 
the tools themselves intelligent, like those 
golden automata of old that Hephaestus made, 
to run and wait upon the gods on Olympus. 
Down drops the punch. There is a burst of 
flame, as though the molten steel rebelled, and 
out comes the shell or the howitzer in the 
rough, nosed and hollowed, and ready for the 
turning. 

The men here are great, powerful fellows, 
blanched with heat and labour; amid the flame 



ENGLAND'S EFFORT 51 

and smoke of the forges one sees them as typi- 
cal figures in the national struggle, linked to 
those Dreadnoughts in the North Sea, and to 
those lines in Flanders and Picardy where 
Britain holds her enemy at bay. Everywhere 
the same intensity of effort, whether in the 
men or in those directing them. And what 
delicate and responsible processes ! 

In the next shop, with its rows of shining 
guns, I stop to look at a great gun apparently 
turning itself. No workman is visible for the 
moment. The process goes on automatically, 
the bright steel emerging under the tool that 
here, too, seems alive. Close to it is a man 
winding steel wire, or rather braid, on a 15- 
inch gun; beyond again there are workmen and 
inspectors testing and gauging another similar 
giant. Look down this shining tube and watch 
the gauging, now with callipers, now with a 
rubber device which takes the impression of 
the rifling and reveals any defect. The gaug- 
ing turns upon the ten-thousandth part of an 
inch, and any mistake or flaw may mean the 
lives of men. . . . 

We turn out into a pale sunshine. The 
morning work is over, and the men are troop- 
ing into the canteens for dinner — and we look 
in a moment to see for ourselves how good a 



52 ENGLAND'S EFFORT 

meal it is. At luncheon, afterwards, in the 
Directors' Offices, I am able to talk with the 
leading citizens of the great town. 

One of them writes some careful notes for 
me. Their report of labour conditions is ex- 
cellent. "No organised strikes and few cessa- 
tions of work to report. Overtime is being 
freely ^worked. Little or no drunkenness, and 
that at a time when the normal earnings of 
many classes of workmen are two or three 
times above the normal level. The methods 
introduced in the twenty years before the war — 
conference and discussion — have practically 
settled all difficulties between employers and 
employed, in these parts at any rate, during 
this time of England's trial." 

After luncheon we diverge to pay another 
all too brief visit to a well-known firm. The 
managing director gives me some wonderful 
figures of a new shell factory they are just put- 
ting up. It was begun in September, 1915. 
Since then 2,000 tons of steelwork has been 
erected, and 200 out of 1,200 machines re- 
quired have been received and fixed. Four 
thousand to 5,000 hands will be ultimately 
employed. 

All the actual production off the machines 
will be done by women — and this, although the 



ENGLAND'S EFFORT 53 

works are intended for a heavy class of shell, 
60-pounder high explosive. Women are al- 
ready showing their capacity — helped by me- 
chanical devices — to deal with this large type 
of shell; and the workshop when in full work- 
ing order is intended for an output of a million 
shells per annum. 

I drive on, overshadowed by these figures. 
" Per annum!" The little common words 
haunt the ear intolerably. Surely before one 
more year is over, this horror under which we 
live will be lifted from Europe! Britain, a 
victorious Britain, will be at peace, and 
women's hands will have something else to do 
than making high-explosive shell. But, mean- 
while, there is no other way. The country's 
call has gone out, clear and stern, and her 
daughters are coming in their thousands to 
meet it, from loom and house and shop. 

A little later, in a great board-room, I find 
the Munitions Committee gathered. Its func- 
tion, of course, is to help the new Ministry in 
organising the war work of the town. In the 
case of the larger firms, the committee has 
been chiefly busy in trying to replace labour 
withdrawn by the war. It has been getting 
skilled men back from the trenches, and ad- 
vising the Ministry as to the "badging" of 



54 ENGLAND'S EFFORT 

munition workers. It has itself, through its 
command of certain scientific workshops, been 
manufacturing gauges and testing materials. 

It has turned the electroplate workshops of 
the town on to making steel helmets, and in 
general has been "working in" the smaller 
engineering concerns so as to make them feed 
the larger ones. This process here, as every- 
where, is a very educating one. The shops 
employed on bicycle and ordinary motor work 
have, as a rule, little idea of the extreme accu- 
racy required in munition work. The idea of 
working to the thousandth of an inch seems to 
them absurd; but they have to learn to work 
to the ten-thousandth, and beyond ! The war 
will leave behind it greatly raised standards 
of work in England ! — that every one agrees. 

And I carry away with me as a last remem- 
brance of this great town and its activities two 
recollections — one of a university man doing 
some highly skilled work on a particularly fine 
gauge: "If you ask me what I have been 
doing for the last few weeks, I can only tell 
you that I have been working like a nigger 
and have done nothing ! Patience ! — that's all 
there is to say." And another of a "trans- 
formed" shop of moderate size, where an active 
and able man, after giving up the whole of his 



ENGLAND'S EFFORT 55 

ordinary business, has thrown himself into the 
provision, within his powers, of the most press- 
ing war needs, as he came across them. 

In July last year, for instance, munitions 
work in many quarters was actually held up 
for want of gauges. Mr. D. made something 
like 10,000, to the great assistance of certain 
new Government shops. Then the Govern- 
ment asked for a particular kind of gun. Mr. 
D. undertook 1,000, and has already delivered 
400. Tools for shell-making are everywhere 
wanted in the rush of the huge demand. Mr. 
D. has been making them diligently. This is 
just one example among hundreds of how a 
great industry is adapting itself to the fiery 
needs of war. 

But the dark has come, and I must catch 
my train. As I speed through a vast industrial 
district I find in the evening papers hideous 
details of the Zeppelin raid, which give a pecu- 
liar passion and poignancy to my recollections 
of a crowded day — and peculiar interest, also, 
to the talk of an able representative of the 
Ministry of Munitions, who is travelling with 
me, and endeavouring to give me a connected 
view of the whole new organisation. As he 
speaks, my thoughts travel to the English 
battle-line, to the trenches and casualty clear- 



56 ENGLAND'S EFFORT 

ing-stations behind it, to distant Russia; and 
I think of the Prime Minister's statement in 
Parliament — that the supply of munitions, for 
all its marvellous increase, it not yet equal to 
the demand. New shops, new workers, new 
efforts — England is producing them now un- 
ceasingly, she must go on producing them. 
There must be no pause or slackening. There 
will be none. 

I am going now to see — after the Midlands — 
what the English and Scotch north is doing to 
swell the stream. And in my next letter there 
will be plenty to say about "Dilution" of la- 
bour, about wages, and drink, and some other 
burning topics of the moment. 



Ill 

Dear H. 

It is now three months since Mr. Lloyd 
George made his startling speech, as Muni- 
tions Minister, in the House of Commons in 
which, as he wound up his review of his new 
department, he declared: "Unless we quicken 
our movements, damnation will fall on the 
sacred cause for which so much gallant blood 
has flowed!" The passion of this peroration 
was like the fret of a river in flood chafing at 
some obstacle in its course. Generally speak- 
ing, the obstacle gives way. In this case Mr. 
George's obstacle had begun to give way long 
before December 21st — the date of the speech. 
The flood had been pushing at it with increas- 
ing force since the foundation of the Ministry of 
Munitions in the preceding summer. But the 
crumbling process was not quick enough for 
Great Britain's needs, or for the energy of her 
Minister. 

Hence the outspoken speech of December 
21st, supported by Mr. Asquith's grave words 
of a few weeks later. "We cannot go on," said 

57 



58 ENGLAND'S EFFORT 

the Prime Minister in effect, "depending upon 
foreign countries for our munitions. We 
haven't the ships to spare to bring them home, 
and the cost is too great. We must make them 
ourselves." "Yes — and quicker!" Mr. Lloyd 
George had already said, with a sharp em- 
phasis, meant to "hustle" that portion of the 
nation which still required hustling; overpaint- 
ing his picture, no doubt, but with quite legit- 
imate rhetoric, in order to produce his effect. 

The result of that fresh "hustling" was the 
appointment of the Dilution Commissioners, a 
second Munitions Act amending the first, and 
a vast expansion all over the country of the 
organisation which had seemed so vast before. 
It was not till midwinter, in the very midst 
of the new and immense effort I have been de- 
scribing, that the Minister of Munitions and 
those working with him convinced themselves 
that, without another resolute push, the bar- 
rier across the stream of the nation's will might 
still fatally hold it back. More and more men 
were wanted every week — in the Army and the 
workshops — and there were not men to go 
round. The second push had to be given — it 
was given — and it still firmly persists. 

In the spring of 1915, the executives of the 
leading trade-unions had promised the Govern- 



ENGLAND'S EFFORT 59 



ment the relaxation of their trade rules for the 
period of the war. Many of the trade-union 
leaders — Mr. Barnes, Mr. Henderson, Mr. 
Hodge, and many others — have worked mag- 
nificently in this sense, and many unions 
have been thoroughly loyal throughout their 
ranks to the pledge given in their name. 
The iron-moulders, the shipwrights, the brass- 
workers may be specially mentioned. But in 
the trades mostly concerned with ammunition, 
there were certain places and areas where the 
men themselves, as distinct from their respon- 
sible leaders, offered a dogged, though often 
disguised resistance. Personally, I think that 
any one at all accustomed to try and look at 
labour questions from the point of view of 
labour will understand the men while heartily 
sympathising with the Minister, who was de- 
termined to get "the goods" and has suc- 
ceeded in getting them. Here, in talking of 
"the men" I except that small revolutionary 
element among them which has no country, 
and exists in all countries. And I except, too, 
instances which certainly are to be found, 
though rarely, of what one might call a purely 
mean and overreaching temper on the part 
of workmen — taking advantage of the nation's 
need, as some of the less responsible employers 



60 ENGLAND'S EFFORT 

have no doubt, also, taken advantage of it. 
But, in general, it seems to me, there has been 
an honest struggle in the minds of thousands 
of workmen between what appears to them the 
necessary protection of their standards of life 
— laboriously attained through long effort — 
and the call of the war. And that the over- 
whelming majority of the workmen concerned 
with munitions should have patriotically and 
triumphantly decided this struggle as they 
have — under pressure, no doubt, but under no 
such pressure as exists in a conscripted, still 
more in an invaded, nation — may rank, I 
think, when all is said, with the raising of our 
voluntary Armies as another striking chapter 
in the book of England's Effort. 

In this chapter, then, Dilution will always 
take a leading place. 

What is Dilution ? 

It means, of course, that under the sharp 
analysis of necessity much engineering work, 
generally reckoned as "skilled" work, and re- 
served to "skilled" workmen, by a number of 
union regulations, is seen to be capable of 
solution into various processes, some of which 
can be sorted out from the others as within the 
capacity of the unskilled or semiskilled worker. 
By so dividing them up, and using the superior 



ENGLAND'S EFFORT 61 

labour with economy, only where it is really 
necessary, it can be made to go infinitely fur- 
ther; and the inferior or untrained labour can 
then be brought into work where nobody sup- 
posed it could be used, where, in fact, it never 
has been used. 

Obvious enough, perhaps. But the idea had 
to be applied in haste to living people — em- 
ployers, many of whom shrank from reorgan- 
ising their workshops and changing all their 
methods at a moment's notice; and workmen 
looking forward with consternation to being 
outnumbered, by ten to one, in their own 
workshops, by women. When I was in the 
Midlands and the North, at the end of Janu- 
ary and in early February, Dilution was still 
an unsettled question in some of the most im- 
portant districts. One of the greatest em- 
ployers in the country writes to me to-day 
(March 24): "Since January, we have passed 
through several critical moments, but, even- 
tually, the principle was accepted, and Dilution 
is being introduced as fast as convenient. 
For this we have very largely to thank an ad- 
mirable Commission (Sir Croydon Marks, Mr. 
Barnes, and Mr. Shackleton) which was sent 
down to interview employers and employed. 
Their tact and acumen were remarkable. 



62 ENGLAND'S EFFORT 

Speaking personally, I cannot help believing 
that there is a better understanding between 
masters and men now than has existed in my 
memory. " 

A great achievement that! — for both em- 
ployers and employed — for the Minister also 
who appointed the Commission and set the 
huge stone rolling yet another leap upon its 
way. 

It will be readily seen how much depends 
also on the tact of the individual employer. 
That employer has constantly done best who 
has called his men into council with him, and 
thrown himself on their patriotism and good 
sense. I take the following passage from an 
interesting report by a very shrewd observer, 
printed in one of the northern newspapers. 
It describes an employer as saying: 



I was told by the Ministry that I should have to double 
my output. Labour was scarce and I consulted a deputation 
of the men about it. I told them the problem and said I 
should be glad of suggestions. I told them that we should 
either have to get men or women, and I asked them for their 
co-operation, as there would be a great deal of teaching to be 
done. "Probably," I said, "you would like to find the men ?" 
They agreed to try. I gave them a week, and at the end of 
a week they came to me and said they would rather have 
women. I said to them: "You must all pull together." They 
gave me their word. Right from the beginning they have 



ENGLAND'S EFFORT 63 

done their level best to help and things have gone on per- 
fectly. On one occasion, a woman complained that the man 
directing her was "working against her." I called the men's 
committee together, said the employer. I told them the facts, 
and they have dealt with the offender themselves. 

The general system now followed in the 
shell factories is to put so many skilled men in 
charge of so many lathes worked by women 
workers. Each skilled man, who teaches the 
women, sets the tools, and keeps the machines 
in running order, oversees eight, ten, or more 
machines. But sometimes the comradeship is 
much closer. For instance (I quote again the 
witness mentioned above), in a machine tool 
shop, one of the most highly skilled parts of the 
engineers' business, you may now see a man, 
with a woman to help him, operating two 
lathes. If the woman falls into any difficulty 
the man comes to help her. Both can earn 
more money than each could earn separately, 
and the skilled man who formerly worked the 
second lathe is released. In the same shop a 
woman watched a skilled man doing slot- 
drilling — a process in which thousandths of an 
inch matter — for a fortnight. Now she runs 
the machine herself by day, while the man 
works it on the night shift. One woman in 
this shop is "able to do her own tool-setting." 



64 ENGLAND'S EFFORT 

The observer thinks she must be the only 
woman tool-setter in the country, and he 
drops the remark that her capacity and will 
may have something to do with the fact that 
she has a husband at the front ! Near by, as 
part of the same works, which are not special- 
ised, but engaged in general engineering, is a 
bomb shop staffed by women, which is now 
sending 3,000 bombs a week to the trenches. 
Women are also doing gun-breech work of 
the most delicate and responsible kind under 
the guidance of a skilled overseer. One of the 
women at this work was formerly a char- 
woman. She has never yet broken a tool. 
All over the works, indeed, the labour of 
women and unskilled men is being utilised in 
the same scientific way. Thus the area of the 
works has been doubled in a few months, 
without the engagement of a single additional 
skilled man from outside. "We have made 
the men take an interest in the women," say 
the employers. "That is the secret of our suc- 
cess. We care nothing at all about the money, 
we are all for the output. We make nothing 
out of the women financially. If the men 
think you are going to exploit women and 
cheapen the work, the scheme is crabbed right 
away." 



ENGLAND'S EFFORT 65 

I myself came across the effect of this sus- 
picion in the minds of the workmen in the 
case of a large Yorkshire shell factory, where 
the employers at once detected and slew it. 
This great workshop, formerly used for rail- 
way work, now employs some 1,300 women, 
with a small staff of skilled men. The women 
work forty-five hours a week in eight-hour 
shifts — the men fifty-three hours on twelve- 
hour shifts. There is no difficulty whatever 
in obtaining a full supply of women's labour — 
indeed, the factory has now a waiting-list of 
500. Nor has there been any difficulty with 
the men in regard to the women's work. 
With the exception of two operations, which 
are thought too heavy for them, all the ma- 
chines are run by women. 

But when the factory began, the employers 
very soon detected that it was running below 
its possible output. There was a curious lack 
of briskness in the work — a curious constraint 
among the new workers. Yet the employers 
were certain that the women were keen, and 
their labour potentially efficient. They put 
their heads together, and posted up a notice 
in the factory to the effect that whatever 
might be the increase in the output of piece- 
work, the piece-work rate would not be altered. 



66 ENGLAND'S EFFORT 

Instantly the atmosphere began to clear, the 
pace of the machines began to mount. 

It was a factory in which the work was new, 
the introduction of women was new, and the 
workers strange to each other, and for the 
most part strange to their employers. A small 
leaven of distrust on the part of the men 
workers was enough, and the women were soon 
influenced. Luckily, the mischief was as 
quickly scotched. Men and women began to 
do their best, the output of the factory — which 
had been planned for 14,000 shells a week — 
ran up to £0,000, and everything has gone 
smoothly since. 

Let me now, however, describe another effect 
of Dilution — the employment of unskilled men 
on operations hitherto included in skilled en- 
gineering. 

On the day after the factory I have just de- 
scribed, my journey took me to another town 
close by, where my guide — a Director of one 
of the largest and best-known steel and engi- 
neering works in the kingdom — showed me a 
new shell factory filled with 800 to 900 men, 
all "medically unfit" for the Army, and al- 
most all drawn from the small trades and pro- 
fessions of the town, especially from those 
which had been hard hit by the war. Among 



ENGLAND'S EFFORT 67 

those I talked to I found a keeper of bathing- 
machines, a publican's assistant, clerks, shop 
assistants, three clergy — these latter going 
home for their Sunday duty, and giving their 
wages to the Red Cross — unemployed archi- 
tects, and the like. 

I cannot recall any shop which made a 
greater impression of energy, of a spirit behind 
the work, than this shop. In its inspecting- 
room I found a graduate from Yale. "I had 
to join in the fight," he said quietly — "this 
was the best way I could think of." And it 
was noticeable besides for some remarkable 
machines, which your country had also sent 
us. 

In other shell factories a single lathe carries 
through one process, interminably repeated, 
sometimes two, possibly three. But here, with 
the exception of the fixing and drilling of the 
copper band, and a few minor operations, one 
lathe made the shell — cut, bored, roughed, 
turned, nosed, and threaded it, so that it 
dropped out, all but the finished thing — minus, 
of course, the fuse. The steel pole introduced 
at the beginning of the process made nine shells, 
and the average time per shell was twenty- 
three minutes. No wonder that in the great 
warehouse adjoining the workshop one saw the 



68 ENGLAND'S EFFORT 

shell heaps piling up in their tens of thousands 
— only to be rushed off week by week, inces- 
santly, to the front. The introduction of these 
machines had been largely the work of an able 
Irish manager, who described to me the intense 
anxiety with which he had watched their first 
putting up and testing, lest the vast expendi- 
ture incurred should have been in any degree 
thrown away. His cheerful looks and the shell 
warehouse told the sequel. When I next met 
him it was at a northern station in company 
with his Director. They were then apparently 
in search of new machinery ! The workshop 
I had seen was being given over to women, and 
the men were moving on to heavier work. And 
this is the kind of process which is going on 
over the length and breadth of industrial Eng- 
land. 

So far, however, I have described the expan- 
sion or adaptation of firms already existing. 
But the country is now being covered with 
another and new type of workshop — the Na- 
tional Shell factories — which are founded, 
financed, and run by the Ministry of Muni- 
tions. The English Government is rapidly be- 
coming, if it has not already become, the great- 
est engineering employer in the world. 

Let me take an illustration from a Yorkshire 



ENGLAND'S EFFORT 69 

town — a town where this Government engi- 
neering is rapidly absorbing everything but 
the textile factories. A young and most com- 
petent Engineer officer is the Government head 
of the factory. The work was begun last July, 
by the help of borrowed lathes, in a building 
which had been used for painting railway-car- 
riages; its first shell was completed last Au- 
gust. The staff last June was 1. It is now 
about 200, and the employees nearly 2,500. 

A month after the first factory was opened, 
the Government asked for another — for larger 
shell. It was begun in August, and was in 
work in a few weeks. In September a still 
larger factory — for larger shells — (how these 
demands illustrate the course of the war! — 
how they are themselves illuminated by the 
history of Verdun !) was seen to be necessary. 
It was begun in September, and is now running. 
Almost all the machines used in the factory 
have been made in the town itself, and about 
100 small firms, making shell parts — fuses, 
primers, gaines, etc. — have been grouped round 
the main firm, and are every day sending in 
their work to the factory to be tested, put to- 
gether, and delivered. 

No factory made a better impression upon 
me than this one. The large, airy building 



70 ENGLAND'S EFFORT 

with its cheerful lighting; the girls in their 
dark-blue caps and overalls, their long and 
comely lines reminding one of some proces- 
sional effect in a Florentine picture; the high 
proportion of good looks, even of delicate 
beauty, among them; the upper galleries with 
their tables piled with glittering brasswork, 
amid which move the quick, trained hands of 
the women — if one could have forgotten for a 
moment the meaning of it all, one might have 
applied to it Carlyle's description of a great 
school, as "a temple of industrious peace." 

Some day, perhaps, this "new industry" — 
as our ancestors talked of a "new learning" — 
this swift, astonishing development of indus- 
trial faculty among our people, especially 
among our women, will bear other and rich 
fruit for England under a peaceful sky. It is 
impossible that it should pass by without 
effect, profound effect upon our national life. 
But at present it has one meaning and one 
only — war! 

Talk to these girls and women. This woman 
has lost her son — that one her husband. This 
one has a brother home on leave, and is rejoic- 
ing in the return of her husband from the 
trenches, as a skilled man, indispensable in 
the shop; another has friends in the places and 



ENGLAND'S EFFORT 71 

among the people which suffered in the last 
Zeppelin raid. She speaks of it with tight lips. 
Was it she who chalked the inscription found 
by the Lady Superintendent on a lathe some 
nights ago — "Done fourteen to-day. Beat that 
if you can, you devils!" 

No ! — under this fast-spreading industry, 
with its suggestion of good management and 
high wages, there is the beat of no ordinary im- 
pulse. Some feel it much more than others; 
but, says the clever and kindly Superintendent, 
I have already quoted: "The majority are 
very decidedly working from the point of view 
of doing something for their country. ... A 
great many of the fuse women are earning for 
the first time. . . . The more I see of them 
all, the better I like them." And then follow 
some interesting comments on the relation of 
the more educated and refined women among 
them to the skilled mechanics — two national 
types that have perhaps never met in such 
close working contact before. One's thoughts 
begin to follow out some of the possible social 
results of this national movement. 



72 ENGLAND'S EFFORT 



II 

But now the Midlands and the Yorkshire 
towns are behind me. The train hurries on 
through a sunny afternoon, and I look through 
some notes sent me by an expert in the great 
campaign. Some of them represent its hu- 
mours. Here is a perfectly true story, which 
shows an Englishman with "a move on," not 
unworthy of your side of the water. 

A father and son, both men of tremendous 
energy, were the chiefs of a very large factory, 
which had been already extensively added to. 
The father lived in a house alongside the works. 
One day business took him into the neighbour- 
ing county, whilst the son came up to London 
on munition work. On the father's return he 
was astonished to see a furniture van removing 
the contents of his house. The son emerged. 
He had already signed a contract for a new 
factory on the site of his father's house; the 
materials of the house were sold and the furni- 
ture half gone. After a first start, the father 
took it in true Yorkshire fashion — wasting no 
words, and apparently proud of his son ! 

But here we are at last, in the true north — 
crossing a tidal river, with a climbing town be- 



ENGLAND'S EFFORT 73 

yond, its tiled roofs wreathed in smoke, through 
which the afternoon lights are playing. I am 
carried off to a friend's house. Some directors 
of the great works I am come to see look in to 
make a kindly plan for the morrow, and in the 
evening, I find myself sitting next one of the 
most illustrious of modern inventors, with that 
touch of dream in manner and look which so 
often goes with scientific discovery. The in- 
vention of this gentle and courteous man has 
affected every vessel of any size afloat, whether 
for war or trade, and the whole electrical de- 
velopment of the world. The fact was to be 
driven home even to my feminine ignorance of 
mechanics when, a fortnight later, the captain 
of a Flag-ship and I were hanging over the huge 
shaft leading down to the engine-rooms of the 
Superdreadnought, and my companion was 
explaining to me something of the driving 
power of the ship. But on this first meeting, 
how much I might have asked of the kind, 
great man beside me, and was too preoccupied 
to ask! May the opportunity be retrieved 
some day ! My head was really full of the 
astonishing facts, whether of labour or of out- 
put, relating to this world-famous place, which 
were being discussed around me. I do not 
name the place, because the banishment of 



74 ENGLAND'S EFFORT 

names, whether of persons or places, has been 
part of the plan of these articles. But one can 
no more disguise it by writing round it than 
one could disguise Windsor Castle by any de- 
scription that was not ridiculous. Many a 
German officer has walked through these works, 
I imagine, before the war, smoking the ciga- 
rette of peace with their Directors, and inwardly 
ruminating — probably — strange thoughts. If 
any such comes across these few lines, what I 
have written will, I think, do England no 
harm. 

But here are some of the figures that can be 
given. The shop area of the ammunition shops 
alone has been increased eightfold since the out- 
break of war. The total weight of shell de- 
livered during 1915 was — in tons — fourteen 
times as much as that of 1914. The weight of 
shell delivered per week, as between December, 
1914 and December, 1915, had risen nearly 
ten times. The number of work-people, in 
these shops, men and women, had risen (a) as 
compared with the month in which war broke 
out, to a figure eight times as great; (6) as 
compared with December, 1914, to one be- 
tween three and four times as great. And over 
the whole vast enterprise, shipyards, gun shops, 
ammunition shops, with all kinds of naval 



ENGLAND'S EFFORT 75 

and other machinery used in war, the num- 
bers of work-people employed had increased 
since 1913 more than 200 per cent. They, with 
their families, equal the population of a great 
city — you may see a new town rising to meet 
their needs on the farther side of the river. 

As to Dilution, it is now accepted by the men, 
who said when it was proposed to them: 
"Why didn't you come to us six months ago?" 

And it is working wonders here as elsewhere. 
For instance, a particular portion of the breech 
mechanism of a gun used to take one hour and 
twenty minutes to make. On the Dilution plan 
it is done on a capstan, and takes six minutes. 
Where 500 women were employed before the 
war, there are now close on 9,000, and there 
will be thousands more, requiring one skilled 
man as tool-setter to about nine or ten women. 
In a great gun-carriage shop, "what used to be 
done in two years is now done in one month." 
In another, two tons of brass were used before 
the war; a common figure now is twenty-one. 
A large milling shop, now entirely worked by 
men, is to be given up immediately to women. 
And so on. 

Dilution, it seems to me, is breaking down a 
number of labour conventions which no longer 
answer to the real conditions of the engineer- 



76 ENGLAND'S EFFORT 

ing trades. The pressure of the war is doing 
a real service to both employers and employed 
by the simplification and overhauling it is 
everywhere bringing about. 

As to the problem of what is to be done with 
the women after the war, one may safely leave 
it to the future. It is probably bound up with 
that other problem of the great new workshops 
springing up everywhere, and the huge new 
plants laid down. One thinks of the rapid re- 
covery of French trade after the war of 1870, 
and of the far more rapid rate — after forty 
years of machine and transport development, 
at which the industry of the Allied countries 
may possibly recover the ravages of the pres- 
ent war, when once peace is signed. In that 
recovery, how great a part may yet be played 
by these war workshops ! — transformed to the 
uses of peace; by their crowds of work-people, 
and by the hitherto unused intelligence they 
are everywhere evoking and training among 
both men and women. 

As for the following day, my impressions, 
looking back, seem to be all a variant on a well- 
known Greek chorus, which hymns the amaz- 
ing — the "terrible" — cleverness of Man ! Sea- 
faring, tillage, house-building, horse-taming, so 
muses Sophocles, two thousand three hundred 



ENGLAND'S EFFORT 77 

years ago; how did man ever find them out? 
"Wonders are many, but the most wonderful 
thing is man ! Only — against death has he no 
resource." 

Intelligence — and death! They are written 
everywhere in these endless workshops, de- 
voted to the fiercest purposes of war. First of 
all, we visit the "danger buildings" in the fuse 
factory, where mostly women are employed. 
About 500 women are at work here, on different 
processes connected with the delicate mechan- 
ism and filling of the fuse and gaine, some of 
which are dangerous. Detonator work, for in- 
stance. The Lady Superintendent selects for 
it specially steady and careful women or girls, 
who are paid at time-and-a-quarter rate. Only 
about eight girls are allowed in each room. 
The girls here all wear — for protection — green 
muslin veils and gloves. It gives them a curi- 
ous, ghastly look, that fits the occupation. 
For they are making small pellets for the charg- 
ing of shells, out of a high-explosive powder. 
Each girl uses a small copper ladle to take the 
powder out of a box before her, and puts it 
into a press which stamps it into a tiny block, 
looking like ivory. She holds her hand over 
a little tray of water lest any of the powder 
should escape. What the explosive and death- 



78 ENGLAND'S EFFORT 

dealing power of it is, it does not do to think 
about. 

In another room a fresh group of girls are 
handling a black powder for another part of 
the detonator, and because of the irritant na- 
ture of the powder, are wearing white band- 
ages round the nose and mouth. There is 
great competition for these rooms, the Super- 
intendent says ! The girls in them work on 
two shifts of ten and one-half hours each, and 
would resent a change to a shorter shift. 
They have one hour for dinner, half an hour 
for tea, a cup of tea in the middle of the morn- 
ing — and the whole of Saturdays free. To 
the eye of the ordinary visitor they show few 
signs of fatigue. 

After the fuse factory we pass through the 
high-explosive factory, where 250 girls are at 
work in a number of isolated wooden sheds 
rilling 18-pounder shell with high explosive. 
The brass cartridge-case is being filled with 
cordite, bundles of what look like thin brown 
sticks, and the shell itself, including its central 
gaine or tube, with the various deadly explo- 
sives we have seen prepared in the "danger 
buildings." The shell is fitted into the car- 
tridge-case, the primer and the fuse screwed on. 
It is now ready to be fired. 



ENGLAND'S EFFORT 79 

I stand and look at boxes of shells, packed, 
and about to go straight to the front. A 
train is waiting close by to take them the first 
stage on their journey. I little thought then 
that I should see these boxes, or their fellows, 
next, on the endless ranks of ammunition lor- 
ries behind the fighting fines in France, and 
that within a fortnight I should myself stand 
by and see one of those shells fired from a 
British gun, little more than a mile from Neuve 
Chapelle. 

But here are the women and girls trooping 
out to dinner. A sweet-faced Superintendent 
comes to talk to me. "They are not as strong 
as the men," she says, pointing to the long 
lines of girls, "but what they lack in strength 
they make up in patriotic spirit." I speak to 
two educated women, who turn out to be High 
School mistresses from a town that has been 
several times visited by Zeppelins. "We just 
felt we must come and help to kill Germans," 
they say quietly. "All we mind is getting up 
at five-thirty every morning. Oh, no! it is 
not too tiring." 

Afterward? — I remember one long proces- 
sion of stately shops, with their high windows, 
their floors crowded with machines, their roofs 
lined with cranes, the flame of the forges, and 



80 ENGLAND'S EFFORT 

the smoke of the fizzling steel lighting up the 
dark groups of men, the huge howitzer shells, 
red-hot, swinging in mid-air, and the same 
shells, tamed and gleaming, on the great lathes 
that rough and bore and finish them. Here 
are shell for the Queen Elizabeth guns! — the 
biggest shell made. This shop had been put 
up by good luck just as the war began. Its 
output of steel has increased from 80 tons a 
week to 1,040. 

Then another huge fuse shop, quite new, 
where 1,400 girls in one shift are at work — said 
to be the largest fuse shop known. And on 
the following morning, an endless spectacle of 
war work — gun-carriages, naval turrets, tor- 
pedo tubes, armed railway carriages, small 
Hotchkiss guns for merchant ships, tool-making 
shops, gauge shops — and so on for ever. In 
the tool-making shops the output has risen 
from 44,000 to 3,000,000 a year ! 

And meanwhile I have not seen anything, 
and shall not have time to see anything of the 
famous shipyards of the firm. But with re- 
gard to them, all that it is necessary to remem- 
ber is that before the war they were capable 
of berthing twenty ships at once, from the 
largest battleship downward; and we have 
Mr. Balfour's word for it as to what has hap- 



ENGLAND'S EFFORT 81 

pened, since the war, in the naval shipyards 
of this country. "We have added a million 
tons to the Navy — and we have doubled its 'per- 
sonnel" 

And now let me record two final sayings. 

One from a manager of a department: 

We have a good many Socialists here, and they constantly 
give trouble. But the great majority of the men have done 
wonderfully! Some men have put in one hundred hours a 
week since the war began. Some have not lost a minute since 
it began. The old hands have worked splendidly <t 

And another from one of the Directors: 

I know of no drunkenness among our women. I don't re- 
member ever having seen a drunken woman round here. 



I have almost said my say on munitions, 
though I could continue the story much longer. 
But the wonder of it consists really in its vast- 
ness, in the steady development of a move- 
ment which will not end or slacken till the 
Allies are victorious. Except for the endless 
picturesqueness of the women's share in it, 
and the mechanical invention and adaptation 
going on everywhere, with which only a tech- 
nical expert could deal, it is of course monoto- 



82 ENGLAND'S EFFORT 

nous, and I might weary you. I will only — 
before asking you to cross the Channel with 
me to France — put down a few notes and im- 
pressions on the Clyde district, where, as our 
newspapers will have told you, there is at the 
present moment (March 29th) some serious 
labour trouble, with which the Government is 
dealing. Until further light is thrown upon 
its causes, comment is better postponed. But 
I have spoken quite frankly in these letters of 
"danger spots," where a type of international 
Socialism is to be found — affecting a small 
number of men, over whom the ideas of "coun- 
try" and "national honour" seem to have no 
hold. Every country possesses such men and 
must guard itself against them. A nucleus of 
them exists in this populous and important 
district. How far their influence is helped 
among those who care nothing for their ideas, 
by any real or supposed grievances against the 
employers, by misunderstandings and miscon- 
ceptions, by the sheer nervous fatigue and irri- 
tation of the men's long effort, or by those 
fears for the future of their Unions, to which I 
have once or twice referred, only one long fa- 
miliar with the district could say. I can only 
point out here one or two interesting facts. In 
the first place, in this crowded countryside, 

f 



ENGLAND'S EFFORT 83 

where a small minority of dangerous extremists 
appear to have no care for their comrades in 
the trenches, the recruiting for the new Armies 
— so I learn from one of the leading authorities 
— has been — "taken on any basis whatever — 
substantially higher than in any other district. 
The men came up magnificently." That means 
among those left behind, whatever disturbing 
and disintegrating forces exist in a great La- 
bour centre have freer play than would nor- 
mally be the case. A certain amount of patri- 
otic cream has been skimmed, and in some 
places the milk that remains must be thin. 
In the second place — (you will remember the 
employer I quoted to you in a former letter) 
— the work done here by thousands and thou- 
sands of workmen since the beginning of the 
war, especially in the great shipyards, and done 
with the heartiest and most self-sacrificing 
good-will, has been simply invaluable to the na- 
tion, and England remembers it well. And 
finally, the invasion of women has perhaps 
been more startling to the workmen here than 
anywhere else. Not a single woman was em- 
ployed in the works or factories of the district 
before the war, except in textiles. There will 
soon be 15,000 in the munition workshops, 
and that will not be the end. 
\ 



84 ENGLAND'S EFFORT 

But Great Britain cannot afford — even in a 
single factory — to allow any trifling at this 
moment with the provision of guns, and the 
Government must — and will — act decisively. 

As to the drinking in this district of which 
so much has been said, and which is still far in 
excess of what it ought to be, I found many 
people hard put to it to explain why the re- 
striction of hours which has worked so con- 
spicuously well in other districts has had com- 
paratively little effect here. Is it defects of 
administration, or a certain "cussedness" in 
the Scotch character, which resents any tight- 
ening of law ? One large employer with whom 
I discuss it, believes it would suit the Scotch 
better to abolish all restrictions, and simply 
punish drunkenness much more severely. 
And above all — "open all possible means of 
amusement on Sundays, especially the cine- 
mas !" — a new and strange doctrine, even now, 
in the ears of a country that holds the bones 
of John Knox. There seems indeed to be a 
terribly close connection between the dulness 
of the Scotch Sunday and the obstinacy of 
Scotch drinking; and when one thinks of the 
heavy toil of the week, of the confinement of 
the workshops, and the strain of the work, 
one feels at any rate that here is a problem 



ENGLAND'S EFFORT 85 

which is to be solved, not preached at; and will 
be solved, some day, by nimbler and humaner 
wits than ours. 

In any case, the figures, gathered a month 
ago from those directly concerned, as to the 
general extension of the national effort here, 
could hardly be more striking. In normal 
times, the district, which is given up to Ad- 
miralty work, makes ships and guns, but has 
never made shells. The huge shell factories 
springing up all over it are a wholly new cre- 
ation. As usual, they are filled with women, 
working under skilled male direction, and 
everywhere one found among managers and 
superintendents the same enthusiasm for the 
women's work. "It's their honour they work 
on," said one forewoman. " That's why they 
stand it so well." The average working week 
is fifty-four hours, but overtime may seriously 
lengthen the tale. Wages are high; canteens 
and rest-rooms are being everywhere pro- 
vided; and the housing question is being 
tackled. The rapidity of the women's piece- 
work is astonishing, and the mingling of 
classes — girls of education and refinement 
working quite happily with those of a much 
humbler type — runs without friction under 
the influence of a common spirit. This com- 



86 ENGLAND'S EFFORT 

mon spirit was well expressed by a girl who 
before she came to the factory was working a 
knitting-machine. "I like this better — because 
there's a purpose in it." A sweet-faced woman 
who was turning copper bands for shell, said 
to me: "I never worked a machine before the 
war. I have done 912 in ten hours, but that 
tired me very much. I can do 500 or 600 quite 
easily." 

On the same premises, after leaving the shell 
shops, we passed rapidly through gun shops, 
where I saw again processes .which had become 
almost familiar. "The production of howit- 
zers," said my guide, "is the question of the 
day. We are making them with great rapidity 
— but the trouble is to get enough machines." 
The next shop, devoted to 18-pounder field- 
guns, was "green fields fifteen months ago," 
and the one adjoining it, a fine shed about 
400 feet square, for howitzer work, was started 
in August last, on a site "which was a bog with 
a burn running through it." Soon "every 
foot of space will be filled with machines, and 
there will be 1,200 people at work here, in- 
cluding 400 women. In the next shop we are 
turning out about 4,000 shrapnel and 4,000 
high-explosive shells per week. When we 
started women on what we thought this heavy 



ENGLAND'S EFFORT 87 

shell, we provided men to help lift the shell 
in and out of the machines. The women thrust 
the men aside in five minutes." 

Later on, as I was passing through a series 
of new workshops occupied with all kinds of 
army work and employing large numbers of 
women, I stopped to speak to a Belgian wom- 
an. "Have you ever done any machine work 
before ? " "No, Madame, never — Mais, c'est la 
guerre. II faut tuer les Allemandsl" It was 
a quiet, passionless voice. But one thought, 
with a shiver, of those names of eternal infamy 
— of Termonde, Aerschot, Dinant, Louvain. 

It was with this woman's words in my ears 
that I set out on my last visit — to which they 
were the fitting prelude. The afternoon was 
darkening fast. The motor sped down a river 
valley, sodden with rain and melting snow, 
and after some miles we turn into a half -made 
road, leading to some new buildings, and a 
desolate space beyond. A sentry challenges 
us, and we produce our permit. Then we dis- 
mount, and I look out upon a wide stretch of 
what three months ago was swamp, or wet 
plough land. Now its 250 acres are enclosed 
with barbed wire, and patrolled by sentries 
night and day. A number of small buildings, 
workshops, stores, etc., are rising all over it. 



88 ENGLAND'S EFFORT 

I am looking at what is to be the great "fill- 
ing" factory of the district, where 9,000 women, 
in addition to male workmen, will soon be em- 
ployed in charging the shell coming from the 
new shell factories we have left behind in the 
darkness. 

Strange and tragic scene ! Strange uprising 
of women ! 

We regain the motor and speed onwards, 
my secretary and I, through unknown roads 
far away from the city and its factories to- 
wards the country house where we are to spend 
the night. In my memory there surge a thou- 
sand recollections of all that I have seen in 
the preceding fortnight. An England roused 
at last — rushing to factory, and lathe, to ship- 
yard and forge, determined to meet and 
dominate her terrible enemy in the workshop, 
as she has long since met and dominated him 
at sea, and will in time dominate him on land 
— that is how my country looks to me to-night. 

. . . The stars are coming out. Far away, 
over what seems like water with lights upon 
it, there are dim snowy mountains — majestic — 
rising into the sky. The noise and clamour of 
the factories are all quiet in the night. Two 
thoughts remain with me — Britain's ships in 
the North Sea — Britain's soldiers in the 



ENGLAND'S EFFORT 89 

trenches. And encircling and sustaining both, 
the justice of a great cause — as these white 
Highland hills look down upon and encircle 
this valley.. 



IV 

Dear H. 

A million and a half of men — over a quarter 
of a million of women — working in some 4,000 
State-controlled workshops for the supply of 
munitions of war, not only to our own troops, 
but to those of our allies — the whole, in the 
main, a creation of six months' effort — this is 
the astonishing spectacle of some of the de- 
tails of which I have tried, as an eye-witness, 
to give you in my previous letters a rapid and 
imperfect sketch. 

But what of the men, the Armies, for which 
these munitions are being made and hurried 
to the fighting-lines? It was at Aldershot, a 
few days ago, that I listened to some details 
of the first rush of the new Armies, given me 
by a member of the Headquarters Staff who 
had been through it all. Aldershot in peace 
time held about 27,000 troops. Since the out- 
break of war some million and a quarter of 
men have passed through the great camp, com- 
ing in ceaselessly for training and equipment, 
and going out again to the theatres of war. 

90 



ENGLAND'S EFFORT 91 

In the first days and weeks of the war — dur- 
ing and after the marvellous precision and 
rapidity with which the Expeditionary Force 
was despatched to France — men poured in 
from all parts, from all businesses and occu- 
pations; rich and poor, north and south coun- 
try men, English, Scotch, Irish, and Welsh; 
men from the Dominions, who had flung them- 
selves into the first home-coming steamer; men 
from India, and men from the uttermost parts 
of Africa and Asia who had begged or worked 
their way home. They were magnificent ma- 
terial. They came with set faces, asking only 
for training, training, training ! — and "what the 
peace soldier learns in six months," said my 
companion, "they learnt in six weeks. We had 
neither uniforms nor rifles, neither guns nor 
horses for them. We did not know how to feed 
them or to house them. In front of the head- 
quarters at Aldershot, that Mecca of the sol- 
dier, where no one would dare to pass in ordi- 
nary times whose turnout is not immaculate, 
the most extraordinary figures, in bowler hats 
and bits of uniform, passed unrebuked. We 
had to raid the neighbouring towns for food, 
to send frantic embassies to London for bread 
and meat; to turn out any sort of shed to house 
them. Luckily it was summer w r eather; other- 



92 ENGLAND'S EFFORT 

wise I don't know what we should have done 
for blankets. But nobody 'groused.' Every- 
body worked, and there were many who felt 
it 'the time of their lives.'" 

And yet England "engineered the war!" 
England's hypocrisy and greed demanded the 
crushing of Germany — hence the lying "ex- 
cuse" of Belgium — that apparently is what 
all good Germans — except those who know 
better — believe; what every German child is 
being taught. As I listen to my companion's 
story, I am reminded, however, of a puzzled 
remark which reached me lately, written just 
before Christmas last, by a German nurse in a 
Berlin hospital, who has English relations, 
friends of my own. "We begin to wonder 
whether it really was England who caused the 
war — since you seem to be so dreadfully un- 
prepared!" So writes this sensible girl to one 
of her mother's kindred in England, in a letter 
which escaped the German censor. She might 
indeed wonder ! ■ To have deliberately planned 
a Continental war with Germany, and Ger- 
many's 8,000,000 of soldiers, without men, 
guns, or ammunition beyond the requirements 
of an Expeditionary Force of 160,000 men, 
might have well become the State of Cloud- 
Cuckoo-Land. But the England of Raleigh, 



ENGLAND'S EFFORT 93 

Chatham, Pitt, and Wellingon has not gener- 
ally been reckoned a nation of pure fools. 

The military camps of Great Britain tell the 
tale of our incredible venture. " Great areas of 
land had to be cleared, levelled, and drained; 
barracks had to be built; one camp alone used 
42,000 railway truck-loads of building ma- 
terial." There was no time to build new rail- 
ways, and the existing roads were rapidly worn 
out. They were as steadily repaired; and on 
every side new camps sprang up around the 
parent camps of the country. 

The Surrey commons and woods, the Wilt- 
shire downs, the Midland and Yorkshire heaths, 
the Buckinghamshire hills have been every- 
where invaded — their old rural sanctities are 
gone. I walked in bewilderment the other day 
up and down the slopes of a Surrey hill which 
when I knew it last was one kingdom of pur- 
ple heather, beloved of the honey-bees, and 
scarcely ever trodden by man or woman. 
Barracks now form long streets upon its 
crest and sides; practise-trenches, bombing- 
schools, the stuffed and dangling sacks for bay- 
onet training, musketry ranges, and the rest, 
are everywhere. Tennyson, whose wandering 
ground it once was, would know it no more. 
And this camp is only one of a series which 



94 ENGLAND'S EFFORT 

spread far and wide round the Aldershot head- 
quarters. 

Near my own home, a park and a wooded hill- 
side, that two years ago were carefully guarded 
even from a neighbour's foot, are now oc- 
cupied by a large town of military huts, which 
can be seen for miles round. And fifteen miles 
away, in a historic "chase" where Catharine 
of Aragon lived while her trial was proceeding 
in a neighbouring town, a duke, bearing one 
of the great names of England, has himself 
built a camp, housing 1,200 men, for the re- 
cruits of his county regiments alone, and has 
equipped it with every necessary, whether for 
the soldier's life or training. But everywhere 
— East, North, South, and West — the English 
and Scotch roads are thronged with soldiers 
and horses, with trains of artillery wagons and 
Army Service lorries, with men marching back 
from night attacks or going out to scout and 
skirmish on the neighbouring commons and 
through the most sacred game-preserves. 
There are no more trespass laws in England 
— for the soldier. 

You point to our recruiting difficulties — 
to the recrimination, in Parliament. True 
enough. Lord Derby has not apparently 
solved the riddle; for riddle it is, in a country 



ENGLAND'S EFFORT 95 

of voluntary service, where none of the prepara- 
tions necessary to fit conscription into ordinary 
life, with its obligations, have ever been made. 
The Government and the House of Commons 
are just now wrestling with it afresh, and pub- 
lic opinion seems to be hardening towards cer- 
tain final measures that would have been im- 
possible earlier in the war.* The call is still for 
men — more — and more — men ! And given the 
conditions of this war, it is small wonder that 
England is restless till they are found. But 
amid the cross currents of criticism, I catch 
the voice of Mr. Walter Long, the most prac- 
tical, the least boastful of men, in the House 
of Commons, a few nights ago: Say what 
you like, blame, criticise, as you like, but 
"what this country has done since August, 
1914, is an almost incredible story." And so 
it is. 

And now let us follow some of these khaki- 
clad millions across the seas, through the rein- 
forcement camps, and the great supply bases, 
towards that fierce reality of war to which 
everything tends. 

* Since these lines were writtten the crisis in the Government, the 
Irish rising, and the withdrawal of the military service bill have hap- 
pened in quick succession. The country is still waiting (April 28th) for 
the inevitable end. 



96 ENGLAND'S EFFORT 



II 

It was about the middle of February, after 
my return from the munition factories, that I 
received a programme from the War Office of 
a journey in France, which I was to be allowed 
to make. I remember being at first much dis- 
satisfied with it. It included the names of 
three or four places well known to be the cen- 
tres of English supply organisation in France. 
But it did not include any place in or near the 
actual fighting lines. To me, in my ignorance, 
the places named mainly represented the great 
array of finely equipped hospitals to be found 
everywhere in France in the rear of our Armies; 
and I was inclined to say that I had no special 
knowledge of hospital work, and that one 
could see hospitals in England, with more 
leisure to feel and talk with the sufferers in 
them than a ten days' tour could give. A 
friendly Cabinet Minister smiled when I pre- 
sented this view. "You had better accept. 
You will find it very different from what you 
suppose. The 'back' of the Army includes 
everything." He was more than right ! 

The conditions of travelling at the present 
moment, within the region covered by the 



ENGLAND'S EFFORT 97 

English military organisation in France, for a 
woman possessing a special War Office pass, 
in addition to her ordinary passport, and un- 
derstood to be on business which has the 
good-will of the Government, though in no 
sense commissioned by it, are made easy by 
the courtesy and kindness of everybody con- 
cerned. From the moment of landing on the 
French side, my daughter and I passed into 
the charge of the military authorities. An 
officer accompanied us; a War Office motor 
took us from place to place; and everything 
that could be shown us in the short ten days of 
our tour was freely open to us. The trouble, 
indeed, that was taken to enable me to give 
some of the vividness of personal seeing to 
these letters is but one of many proofs, I ven- 
ture to think, of that warm natural wish in 
British minds that America should understand 
why we are fighting this war, and how we are 
fighting it. As to myself, I have written in 
complete freedom, affected only by the abso- 
lutely necessary restrictions of the military 
censorship; and I only hope I may be able to 
show something, however inadequately, of the 
work of men who have done a magnificent 
piece of organisation, far too little realised even 
in their own country. 



98 ENGLAND'S EFFORT 

For in truth we in England know very little 
about our bases abroad; about what it means 
to supply the ever-growing needs of the English 
Armies in France. The military world takes 
what has been done for granted; the general 
English public supposes that the Tommies, 
when their days in the home camps are done, 
get "somehow" conveyed to the front, being 
"somehow" equipped, fed, clothed, nursed, 
and mended, and sent on their way across 
France in interminable lines of trains. As to 
the details of the process, it rarely troubles its 
head. The fact is, however, that the work of 
the great supply bases abroad, of the various 
Corps and Services connected with them — 
Army Ordnance, Army Service, Army Medical, 
railway and motor transport — is a desperately 
interesting study; and during the past eight- 
een months, under the "I. G. C." — Inspector- 
General of Communications — has developed 
some of the best brains in the Army. 

Two days spent under the guidance of the 
Base Commandant or an officer of his staff 
among the docks and warehouses of a great 
French port, among the huts of its reinforce- 
ment camp, which contains more men than Al- 
dershot before August, 1914, or in its workshops 
of the Army Ordnance Corps, gave me my first 



ENGLAND'S EFFORT 99 

experience of the organising power that has 
gone to these departments of the war. The 
General in command of the base was there in 
the first weeks of the struggle and during the 
great retreat. He retired with his staff to 
Nantes — leaving only a broken motor-car be- 
hind him ! — just about the time that the French 
Government betook itself to Bordeaux. But 
in September he was back again, and the 
building-up process began, which has since 
known neither stop nor stay. That the com- 
mercial needs of a great French port should 
have been able to accommodate themselves as 
they have to the military needs of the British 
Army speaks loudly for the tact and good feel- 
ing on both sides. The task has not been at 
all times an easy one; and I could not help 
thinking as we walked together through the 
crowded scene, that the tone and temper of the 
able man beside me — his admiration, simply 
expressed, yet evidently profound, for the 
French spirit in the war, and for the heroic 
unity of the country through all ranks and 
classes, accounted for a great deal. In the 
presence of a good-will so strong, difficulties 
disappear. 

Look now at this immense hangar or store- 
house — the largest in the world — through which 



100 ENGLAND'S EFFORT 

we are walking. It was completed three years 
before the war, partly, it is said, by German 
money, to house the growing cotton-trade of 
the port. It now houses a large proportion of 
the food of the British Army. The hangar is 
half a mile long, and is bounded on one side 
by the docks where the ships are discharging, 
and on the other by the railway lines where 
the trains are loading up for the front. 

You walk through avenues of bacon, through 
streets of biscuits and jam. On the quays just 
outside, ships from England, Canada, Norway, 
Argentina, Australia are pouring out their 
stores. Stand and watch the endless cranes 
at work, and think what English sea power 
means ! And on the other side watch the pack- 
ing of the trucks that are going to the front, 
the order and perfection with which the requi- 
sitions, large and small, of every regiment are 
supplied. 

One thinks of the Crimean scandals. The 
ghost of Florence Nightingale seems to move 
beside us, watching contentedly what has 
come of all that long-reforming labour, deal- 
ing with the health, the sanitation, the food 
and equipment of the soldier, in which she 
played her part; and one might fancy the 
great shade pausing specially beside the wired-in 



ENGLAND'S EFFORT 101 

space labelled "Medical Comforts," and gen- 
erally known as "The Cage." Medical neces- 
saries are housed elsewhere; but here are the 
dainties, the special foods, the easing appliance's 
of all kinds which are to make life bearable to 
many a sorely-wounded man. 

As to the huge sheds of the Army Ordnance, 
which supply everything that the soldier doesn't 
eat, all metal stores — nails, horseshoes, oil- 
cans, barbed wire — by the ton; trenching- 
tools, wheelbarrows, pickaxes, razors, sand- 
bags, knives, screws, shovels, picketing-pegs, 
and the like — they are of course endless; and 
the men who work in them are housed in one 
of the largest sheds, in tiers of bunks from 
floor to ceiling. 

Perhaps the most interesting part of the 
Depot to the outsider are the repairing sheds 
and workshops established in a suburb of the 
town to which we drive on. For this is work 
that has never been done before in connection 
with an army in the field. Day by day trains- 
full of articles for repair come down from the 
front. I happened to see one, later on, leav- 
ing a station close to the fighting line. Guns, 
rifles, range-finders, gun-carriages, harness, all 
torn and useless uniforms, tents, boots by the 
thousand, come to this base to be repaired, 



102 ENGLAND'S EFFORT 

or to be sent home for transformation into 
"shoddy" to the Yorkshire towns. Nothing 
seems too large or too small for Colonel D.'s 
department. Field-glasses, periscopes, water- 
bottles, they arrive from the trenches with the 
same certainty as a wounded howitzer or ma- 
chine-gun, and are returned as promptly. 

In one shed, my guide called my attention 
to shelves on which were a number of small 
objects in china and metal. "They were found 
in kits left on the field," he says, gently. 
"Wherever we can identify the owner, such 
things are carefully returned to his people. 
These could not be identified." 

I took up a little china dog, a bit of coarse 
French pottery, which some dead father had 
bought, at Poperinghe, perhaps, or Bailleul, for 
the children at home. Near by were "sou- 
venirs" — bits of shell, of German equipment; 
then some leaves of a prayer-book, a neck- 
medallion of a saint — and so on. One thought 
of the stories that must belong to every frag- 
ment there. 

The boot and uniform sheds, where 500 
French women and girls, under soldier-foremen, 
are busy, the harness-mending room, and the 
engineering workshops might reassure those 
pessimists among us — especially of my own 



ENGLAND'S EFFORT 103 

sex — who think that the male is naturally and 
incorrigibly a wasteful animal. Colonel D. 
shows me the chart which is the record of his 
work, and its steadily mounting efficiency. 
He began work with 140 men, he is now em- 
ploying more than a thousand, and his repair- 
ing sheds are saving thousands of pounds a 
week to the British Government. He makes 
all his own power, and has four or five pow- 
erful dynamos at work. 

We come out into a swirl of snow, and hence- 
forward sightseeing is difficult. Yet we do our 
best to defy the weather. We tramp through 
the deepening snow of the great camp, which 
lines the slopes of the hills above the river 
and the town, visiting its huts and recreation- 
rooms, its Cinema theatre, and its stores, and 
taking tea with the Colonel of an Infantry Base 
Depot, who is to be our escort on the morrow. 

But on the last morning before we start we 
mount to the plateau above the reinforcement 
camp, where the snow lies deep and the wind 
blows one of the sharpest blasts of the winter. 
Here are bodies of men going through some of 
the last refinements of drill before they start 
for the front; here are trenches of all kinds and 
patterns, revetted in ways new and old, and 
planned according to the latest experience 



104 ENGLAND'S EFFORT 

brought from the fighting line. The instruct- 
ors here, as at other training-camps in France, 
are all men returned from the front. The men 
to whom they have to give the final touch of 
training — men so near themselves to the real 
thing — are impatient of any other sort. 

As we stand beside the trenches under the 
bright sun and piercing wind, looking at the 
black lines of British soldiers on the snow, and 
listening to the explanations of a most keen and 
courteous officer, one's eyes wander, on the one 
side, over the great town and port, over the 
French coast and the distant sea, and on the 
other side, inland, over the beautiful French 
landscape with its farms and country houses. 
Everything one sees is steeped in history, a 
mingled history, in which England and France 
up to five centuries ago bore an almost equal 
share. Now again they are mingled here; all 
the old enmities buried in a comradeship that 
goes deeper far than they, a comradeship of 
the spirit that will surely mould the life of both 
nations for years to come. 

How we grudged the snow and the low- 
sweeping clouds and the closed motor, on our 
drive of the next day ! I remember little more 
of it than occasional glimpses of the tall cliffs 
that stand sentinel along the river, a hasty look 



ENGLAND'S EFFORT 105 

at a fine church above a steeply built town, an 
army lorry stuck deep in the snow-drifts, and 
finally the quays and ships of the base port. 
Our most kind and helpful escort, Colonel S., 
pilots us to a pleasant hotel full of officers, 
mostly English, belonging to the Lines of Com- 
munications, with a few poor wives and moth- 
ers among them who have come over to nurse 
their wounded in one or other of the innumera- 
ble hospitals of the base. 

Before dinner the general commanding the 
base had found me out and I had told my story. 

"Oh, we'll put some notes together for you. 
We were up most of last night. I dare say we 
shall be up most of this. But a little more or 
less doesn't matter." I protested most sin- 
cerely. But it is always the busiest men who 
shoulder the extra burdens; and the notes 
duly reached me. From them, from the talk 
of others spending their last ounce of brain 
and energy in the service of the base, and from 
the evidence of my own eyes, let me try and 
draw some general picture of what that ser- 
vice is. Suppose a British officer speaking: 

Remember first that every man, every horse, every round of 
ammunition, every article of clothing and equipment, all the 
guns and vehicles, and nearly all the food have to be brought 
across the British Channel to maintain and reinforce the ever- 



106 ENGLAND'S EFFORT 

growing British Army, which holds now so important a share 
of the fighting line in France. The ports of entry are already 
overtaxed by the civil and military needs of France herself. 
Imagine how difficult it is — and how the difficulty grows 
daily with the steady increase of the British Army — to receive, 
disembark, accommodate, and forward the multitude of men 
and the masses of material ! 

You see the khaki in the French streets, the mingling every- 
where of French and English; but the ordinary visitor can 
form no idea of the magnitude of this friendly invasion. There 
is no formal delimitation of areas or spaces, in docks, or town, 
or railways. But gradually the observer will realise that the 
town is honeycombed with the temporary locations of the 
British Army, which everywhere speckle the map hanging in 
the office of the Garrison Quartermaster. And let him further 
visit the place where the long lines of reinforcement, training 
and hospital camps are installed on open ground, and old 
England's mighty effort will scarcely hide itself from the least 
intelligent. Work, efficiency, economy must be the watch- 
words of a base. Its functions may not be magnificent — but 
they are war — and war is impossible unless they are rightly 
carried out. 

When we came back from the Loire in September, after our 
temporary retreat, the British personnel at this place grew 
from 1,100 to 11,000 in a week. Now there are thousands of 
troops always passing through, thousands of men in hospital, 
thousands at work in the docks and storehouses. And let any 
one who cares for horses go and look at the Remount Depot 
and the Veterinary Hospitals. The whole treatment of horses 
in this war has been revolutionised. Look at the cheap, in- 
genious stables, the comfort produced by the simplest means, 
the kind quiet handling; look at the Convalescent Horse De- 
pots, the operating theatres, and the pharmacy stores in the 
Veterinary Hospitals. 

As to the troops themselves, every Regiment has its own 



ENGLAND'S EFFORT 107 

lines, for its own reinforcements. Good food, clean cooking, 
civilised dining-rooms, excellent sanitation — the base provides 
them all. It provides, too, whatever else Tommy Atkins wants, 
and close at hand; wet and dry canteens, libraries, recreation 
huts, tea and coffee huts, palatial cinemas, concerts. And 
what are the results? Excellent behaviour; excellent rela- 
tions between the British soldier and the French inhabitants; 
absence of all serious crime. 

Then look at the docks. You will see there armies of labour- 
ers, and long lines of ships discharging horses, timber, rations, 
fodder, coal, coke, petrol. Or at the stores and depots. It 
would take you days to get any idea of the huge quantities 
of stores, or of the new and ingenious means of space economy 
and quick distribution. As to the Works Department — camp3 
and depots are put up "while you wait" by the R. E. officers 
and unskilled military labour. Add to all this the armies of 
clerks, despatch riders, and motor-cyclists — and the immense 
hospital personnel — then, if you make any intelligible picture 
of it in your mind, you will have some idea of what bases like 
these mean. 



Pondering these words, it seemed to me that 
the only way to get some kind of "intelligible 
picture" in two short days was to examine 
something in detail, and the rest in general! 
Accordingly, we spent a long Sunday morn- 
ing in the Motor Transport Depot, which is 
the creation of Colonel B., and perhaps as 
good an example as one could find anywhere 
in France of the organising talent of the able 
British officer. 

The depot opened in a theatre on the 13th 



108 ENGLAND'S EFFORT 

of August, 1914. "It began/' says Colonel 
B., "with a few balls of string and a bag of 
nails!" Its staff then consisted of 6 officers 
and 91 N. C. O.'s and men — its permanent 
staff at present is about 500. All the drivers 
of some 20,000 motor vehicles — nearly 40,000 
men — are tested here and, if necessary, in- 
structed before going up to the fighting lines; 
and the depot deals with 350 different types 
of vehicles. In round figures 100,000 separate 
parts are now dealt with, stored, and arranged 
in the depot. The system of records and ac- 
counts is extraordinarily perfect, and so in- 
genious that it seems to work itself. 

Meanwhile Colonel B.'s relations with his 
army of chauffeurs, of whom about 1,000 are 
always housed on the premises, are exceedingly 
human and friendly in spite of the strictness 
of the army discipline. Most of his men who 
are not married, the Colonel tells me, have 
found a "friend," in the town, one or other of 
its trimly dressed girls, with whom the Eng- 
lish mechanic "walks out," on Sundays and 
holidays. There are many engagements, and, 
as I gather, no misconduct. Marriage is gen- 
erally postponed till after the war, owing to 
the legal and other difficulties involved. But 
marriage there will be when peace comes. As 



ENGLAND'S EFFORT 109 

to how the Englishman and the French girl 
communicate, there are amusing speculations, 
but little exact knowledge. There can be 
small doubt, however, that a number of hybrid 
words perfectly understood by both sides are 
gradually coming into use, and if the war lasts 
much longer, a rough Esperanto will have grown 
up which may leave its mark on both languages. 
The word "narpoo" is a case in point. It is 
said to be originally a corruption of "il n'y a 
plus" — the phrase which so often meets the 
Tommy foraging for eggs or milk or fruit. 
At present it means anything from "done up" 
to "dead." Here is an instance of it, told me 
by a chaplain at the front. He was billeted 
in a farm with a number of men, and a ser- 
geant. All the men, from the chaplain to 
the youngest private, felt a keen sympathy 
and admiration for the industry of the women 
of the farm, who were both working the land 
and looking after their billetees, with wonder- 
ful pluck and energy. One evening the chap- 
lain arriving at the open door of the farm, saw 
in the kitchen beyond it the daughter of the 
house, who had just come in from farm work. 
She was looking at a pile of dirty plates and 
dishes which had to be washed before supper, 
and she gave a sigh of fatigue. Suddenly in 



110 ENGLAND'S EFFORT 

the back door on the other side of the kitchen 
appeared the sergeant. He looked at the girl, 
then at the dishes, then again at the girl. 
"Fattigay?" he said cheerfully, going up to 
her. "Narpoo? Give 'em me. Compree?" 
And before she could say a word he had driven 
her away, and plunged into the work. 

The general relations, indeed, between our 
soldiers and the French population could not 
be better. General after General, both in the 
bases, and at the front dwelt on this point. A 
distinguished General commanding one of our 
armies on the line, spoke to me of it with 
emphasis. "The testimony is universal,^and 
it is equally creditable to both sides." The 
French civilian in town and country is, no 
doubt, profiting by the large demand and 
prompt payments of the British forces. But 
just as in the case of the women munition 
workers, there is infinitely more in it than 
money. On the British part there is, in both 
officers and men, a burning sympathy for what 
France has suffered, whether from the outrages 
of a brutal enemy, or from the inevitable hard- 
ships of war. The headquarters of the Gen- 
eral I have mentioned were not more than 
fifteen or twenty miles from towns where un- 
speakable things were done by German sol- 



ENGLAND'S EFFORT 111 

diers — officers no less than men — in the first 
weeks of the struggle. With such deeds the 
French peasantry and small townsfolk, as they 
still remain in Picardy and Artois, can and do 
contrast, day by day, the temper, the courtesy, 
the humanity of the British soldier. Great 
Britain, of course, is a friend and ally; and 
Germany is the enemy. But these French 
folk, these defenceless women and children, 
know instinctively that the British Army, like 
their own, whether in its officers, or in its rank 
and file, is incapable, toward any non-com- 
batant, of what the German Army has done 
repeatedly, officially, and still excuses and 
defends. 

The signs of this feeling for and sympathy 
with the French civils, among our soldiers, are 
many. Here is one story, slight but illumi- 
nating, told me by an eye-witness. The eye- 
witness is one of a band of women under a 
noble chief, who, since very early in the war, 
have been running a canteen for soldiers, night 
and day, at the large railway-station of the 
very base I have been describing, where trains 
are perpetually arriving from and departing to 
the front. In the early days of the war, a 
refugee train arrived one afternoon full of 
helpless French folk, mainly of course women 



112 ENGLAND'S EFFORT 

and children, and old people, turned out of 
their homes by the German advance. In 
general, the refugees were looked after by the 
French Red Cross, "who did it admirably, 
going along the trains with hot drinks and food 
and clothing." But on this occasion there 
were a number of small children, and some of 
them got overlooked. In the hubbub, "I 
found a raw young Scotchman, from one of 
the Scotch regiments, little more than a boy," 
with six youngsters clinging to him, for whom 
he peremptorily demanded tea. "He had 
tears in his eyes, and his voice was all husky 
as he explained in homely Scotch how the bairns 
had been turned out of their homes — how he 
couldn't bear it — and he would give them tea." 
A table was found. "I provided the milk, 
and he paid for bread and butter and chocolate, 
and waited on and talked to the six little French 
people himself. Strange to say, they seemed 
to understand each other quite well." 

Ill 

It was with this railway-station canteen that 
my latest memories of the great base are con- 
cerned, All the afternoon of our second day 
at was spent in seeing a fine Red Cross 



ENGLAND'S EFFORT 113 

hospital, and then in walking or driving round 
the endless reinforcement and hospital camps 
in the open country. Everywhere the same 
vigorous expanding organisation, the same 
ceaselessly growing numbers, the same hu- 
manity and care in detail. "How many years 
have we been at war ?" one tends to ask oneself 
in bewilderment, as the spectacle unrolls it- 
self. "Is it possible that all this is the work 
of eighteen months?" And I am reminded 
of the Scotch sergeant's reply to his German 
captive, who asked his opinion about the dura- 
tion of the war. "I'll tell you what — it's the 
furrst five years that'll be the worst!" We 
seem — in the bases — to have slipped through 
them already, measuring by any of the ordi- 
nary ratios of work to time. On my return 
home, a diplomat representing one of the 
neutral nations, told me that the Military 
Secretary on his staff had been round the 
English bases in France, and had come back 
with his "eyes starting out of his head." 
Having seen them myself, the phrase seemed 
to me quite natural. 

Then, last of all, as the winter evening fell, 
we turned toward the canteen at the railway- 
station. We found it going on in an old 
goods' shed, simply fitted up with a long tea 



114 ENGLAND'S EFFORT 

and coffee bar, tables and chairs, and some 
small adjacent rooms. It was filled from end 
to end with a crowd of soldiers, who after 
many hours of waiting, were just departing 
for the front. The old shabby room, with its 
points of bright light, and its shadowy sides 
and corners, made a Rembrandtesque setting 
for the moving throng of figures. Some men 
were crowding round the bar; some were 
writing letters in haste to post before the train 
went off; the piano was going, and a few, gath- 
ered round it, were singing the songs of the day, 
of which the choruses were sometimes taken 
up in the room. The men — draughts going 
up to different regiments on the line — appeared 
to me to come from many parts. The broad 
Yorkshire and Cumbrian speech, Scotch, the 
cockney of the Home Counties, the Northum- 
berland burr, the tongues of Devon and Somer- 
set — one seemed to hear them all in turn. 
The demands at the counter had slackened a 
little, and I was presently listening to some of 
the talk of the indefatigable helpers who work 
this thing night and day. One of them drew 
a picture of the Canadians, the indomitable 
fighters of Ypres and Loos, of their breathless 
energy, and impatience of anything but the 
quickest pace of life, their appetites! — half a 



ENGLAND'S EFFORT 115 

dozen hard-boiled eggs, at Sd each, swallowed 
down in a moment of time; then of the French- 
Canadians, their Old World French, their old- 
world Catholicism, simple and passionate. 
One of these last asked if there was any chance 
of his being sent to Egypt. "Why are you so 
anxious to go to Egypt?" "Because it was 
there the Holy Family rested," said the lad 
shyly. The lady to whom he spoke described 
to him the tree and the Holy Well in St. 
Georgius, and he listened entranced. 

Sometimes a rough lot fill the canteen, 
drawn from the poorest class, perhaps, of an 
English seaport. They hustle for their food, 
shout at the helpers, and seem to have no 
notion that such words as "please" and "thank 
you" exist. After three or four hours of bat- 
tling with such an apparently mannerless crew 
one of the helpers saw them depart to the plat- 
form where their train was waiting for them, 
with very natural relief. But they were no 
sooner gone, when a guardsman, with the 
manners, the stature, and the smartness of his 
kind, came back to the counter, and asked to 
speak to the lady in charge of it. "Those 
chaps, Miss, what have just gone out," he 
said apologetically, "have never been used to 
ladies, and they don't know what to say to 



116 ENGLAND'S EFFORT 

them. So they asked me just to come in and 
say for them they were very much obliged for 
all the ladies' kindness, but they couldn't say 
it themselves." The tired helper was suddenly 
too choky to answer. The message, the choice 
of the messenger, as one sure to do "the right 
thing," were both so touching. 

But there was a sudden movement in the 
crowd. The train was up. We all surged out 
upon the platform, and I watched the embarka- 
tion — the endless train engulfing its hundreds 
of men. Just as I had seen the food and 
equipment trains going up from the first base 
laden with everything necessary to replace the 
daily waste of the army, so here was the train 
of human material, going up to replace the 
daily waste of men. After many hours of 
travelling, and perhaps some of rest, these 
young soldiers — how young most of them were ! 
— would find themselves face to face with the 
sharpest realities of war. I thought of what 
I had seen in the Red Cross hospital that after- 
noon — "what man has made of man" — the 
wreck of youth and strength, the hideous pain, 
the helpless disablement. 

But the station rang with laughter and talk. 
Some one in the canteens began to play "Keep 
the Home Fires Burning" — and the men in 



ENGLAND'S EFFORT 117 

the train joined in, though not very heartily, 
for as one or two took care to tell me, laughingly 
— "That and 'Tipperary' are awfully stale 
now!" A bright-faced lad discussed with 

D how long the war would last. "And 

shan't we miss it when it's done ! " he said, 
with a jesting farewell to us, as he jumped into 
the train which had begun to move. Slowly, 
slowly it passed out of sight, amid waves of 
singing and the shouting of good-byes. . . . 

It was late that evening, when after much 
talk with various officers, I went up to my 
room to try and write, bewildered by a multi- 
tude of impressions — impressions of human 
energy, human intelligence, human suffering. 
What England is doing in this war will leave, 
it seems to me, indelible marks upon the na- 
tional character. I feel a natural pride, as I 
sit thinking over the day, in all this British 
efficiency and power, and a quick joy in the 
consciousness of our fellowship with France, 
and hers with us. But the struggle at Verdun 
is still in its first intensity, and after I have 
read all that the evening newspapers contain 
about it, there is in me a fresh and poignant 
realisation of the meaning of what I have been 
seeing. In these great bases, in the marvellous 
railway organisation, in the handling of the 



118 ENGLAND'S EFFORT 

vast motor transport in all its forms, in the 
feeding and equipment of the British Army, we 
have the scaffolding and preparation of war, 
which, both in the French and English Armies, 
have now reached a perfection undreamt of 
when the contest began. But the war itself — 
the deadly struggle of the distant line — to 
which it all tends ? It is in the flash and roar 
of the guns, in the agony and endurance of the 
fighting man, that all this travail of brain and 
muscle speaks at last. At that agony and en- 
durance, women, after all, can only guess — 
through whatever rending of their own hearts. 
But I was to come somewhat nearer to it 
than I thought then. The morrow brought 
surprise. 



Dear H. 

Our journey farther north through the deep 
February snow was scarcely less striking as an 
illustration of Great Britain's constantly grow- 
ing share in the war than the sight of the great 
supply bases themselves. The first part of it, 
indeed, led over solitary uplands, where the 
chained wheels of the motor rocked in the snow, 
and our military chauffeur dared make no 
stop, for fear he should never be able to start 
again. All that seemed alive in the white 
landscape were the partridges — sometimes in 
great flocks — which scudded at our approach, 
or occasional groups of hares in the middle 
distance holding winter parley. The road 
seemed interminably long and straight, and 
ours were almost the first tracks in it. The 
snow came down incessantly, and once or twice 
it looked as though we should be left stranded 
in the white wilderness. 

But after a third of the journey was over, 
the snow began to lessen and the roads to clear. 
We dropped first into a seaport town which 

119 



120 ENGLAND'S EFFORT 

offered much the same mingled scene of French 
and English, of English nurses, and French 
poilus, of unloading ships, and British soldiers, 
as the bases we had left, only on a smaller scale. 
And beyond the town we climbed again on to 
the high land, through a beautiful country of 
interwoven downs, and more plentiful habita- 
tion. Soon, indeed, the roads began to show 
the signs of war — a village or small town, its 
picturesque market-place filled with a park of 
artillery wagons; roads lined with motor lor- 
ries with the painted shell upon them that tells 
ammunition; British artillerymen in khaki, 
bringing a band of horses out of a snow-bound 
farm; closed motor-cars filled with officers 
hurrying past; then an open car with King's 
Messengers, tall, soldierly figures, looking in 
some astonishment at the two ladies, as they 
hurry by. And who or what is this horseman 
looming out of the sleet — like a figure from 
a piece of Indian or Persian embroidery, tur- 
baned and swarthy, his cloak swelling out 
round his handsome head and shoulders, the 
buildings of a Norman farm behind him? 
"There are a few Indian cavalry about here," 
says our guide — "they are billeted in the 
farms." And presently the road is full of 
them. Their Eastern forms, their dark, in- 



ENGLAND'S EFFORT 121 

tent faces pass strangely through the Norman 
landscape. 

Now we are only some forty miles from the 
line, and we presently reach another town con- 
taining an important Headquarters, where we 
are to stop for luncheon. The inn at which 
we put up is like the song in "Twelfth Night," 
"old and plain" — and when lunch is done, our 
Colonel goes to pay an official call at Head- 
quarters, and my daughter and I make our way 
to the historic church of the town. The Colo- 
nel joins us here with another officer, who 
brings the amazing news that "G. H. Q." — 
General Headquarters — that mysterious centre 
and brain of all things — invites us for two days ! 
If we accept, an officer will come for us on the 

morning of March 1st to our hotel in 

and take us by motor, some forty miles, to the 
guest-house where G. H. Q. puts up its visitors. 
" Accept 1" Ah, if one could only forget for 
a moment the human facts behind the absorb- 
ing interest and excitement of this journey, 
one might be content to feel only the stir of 
quickened pulses, of gratitude for a further 
opportunity so tremendous. 

As it was, I saw all the journey hencefor- 
ward with new eyes, because of that to which 
it was bringing us. On we sped, through the 



122 ENGLAND'S EFFORT 

French countryside, past a great forest lying 
black on the edge of the white horizon — I open 
my map and find it marked Bois de Crecy! 
— past another old town, with Agincourt a 
few miles to the east, and so into a region of 
pine and sand that borders the sea. Dark- 
ness comes down, and we miss our way. What 
are these lines of light among the pine woods ? 
Another military and hospital camp, which we 
are to see on the morrow — so we discover at 
last. But we have overshot our goal, and must 
grope our way back through the pine woods to 
the seashore, where a little primitive hotel, 
built for the summer, with walls that seem to 
be made of brown paper, receives us. But we 
have motored far that day, and greet it joy- 
fully. 

The following morning we woke to a silvery 
sunlight, with, at last, some promise of spring 
over a land cleared of snow. The day was spent 
in going through a camp which has been set 
down in one of the pleasantest and healthiest 
spots of France, a favourite haunt of French 
artists before the war. Now the sandy slopes, 
whence the pines, alack, have been cut away, 
are occupied by a British reinforcement camp, 
by long lines of hospitals, by a convalescent 
depot, and by the training-grounds, where, as 



ENGLAND'S EFFORT 123 

at other bases, the newly arrived troops are 
put through their last instruction before going 
to the front. As usual, the magnitude of what 
has been done in one short year filled one with 
amazement. Here is the bare catalogue: In- 
fantry Base Depots, i. e. sleeping and mess- 
quarters, for thousands of men belonging to the 
new armies; 16 hospitals with 21,000 beds; 3 
rifle ranges; 2 training-camps; a machine- 
gun training-school; a vast laundry worked 
by Frenchwomen under British organisation, 
which washes for all the hospitals, 30,000 pieces 
a day; recreation huts of all types and kinds, 
official and voluntary; a Cinema theatre, seat- 
ing 800 men, with performances twice a day; 
nurses' clubs; officers' clubs; a Supply Depot 
for food; an Ordnance Depot for everything 
that is not food; new sidings to the railway, 
where 1,000 men can be entrained on the one 
side, while 1,000 men are detraining on the 
other; or two full ambulance-trains can come 
in and go out; a Convalescent Depot of 2,000 
patients, and a Convalescent Horse Depot of 
2,000 horses, etcetera. And this is the work 
accomplished since last April in one camp. 

Yet, as I look back upon it, my chief impres- 
sion of that long day is an impression, first, 
of endless hospital huts and marquees, with 



\U ENGLAND'S EFFORT 

their rows of beds, in which the pale or flushed 
faces are generally ready — unless pain or weari- 
ness forbid — as a visitor ventures timidly near, 
to turn and smile in response to the few halt- 
ing words of sympathy or inquiry which are 
all one can find to say; and, next, of such a 
wealth of skill, and pity, and devotion poured 
out upon this terrible human need, as makes 
one thank God for doctors, and nurses, and 
bright-faced V. A. D.'s. After all, one trem- 
blingly asks oneself, in spite of the appalling 
facts of wounds, and death, and violence in 
which the human world is now steeped, is it 
yet possible, is it yet true, that that ultimate 
thing, the final power behind the veil — to 
which at least this vast linked spectacle of 
suffering and tenderness, here in this great 
camp, testifies — is not Force, but Love? Is 
this the mysterious message which seems to 
breathe from these crowded wards — to make 
them just bearable. Let me recollect the open 
door of an operating theatre, and a young offi- 
cer, quite a boy, lying there with a bullet in his 
chest, which the surgeons were just about to 
try and extract. The fine, pale features of the 
wounded man, the faces of the surgeon and the 
nurses, so intent and cheerfully absorbed, the 
shining surfaces and appliances of the white 



ENGLAND'S EFFORT 125 

room — stamp themselves on memory. I recol- 
lect, too, one John S , a very bad case, a 

private. "Oh, you must come and see John 

S ," says one of the Sisters. "We get all 

the little distractions we can for John. Will 
he recover? Well, we thought so — but" — her 
face changes gravely — "John himself seems 
to have made up his mind lately. He knows 
— but he never complains." Knows what? 
We go to see him, and he turns round philo- 
sophically from his tea. "Oh, I'm all right — 
a bit tired — that's all." And then a smile 
passes between him and his nurse. He has 
lost a leg, he has a deep wound in his back 
which won't heal, which is draining his life 

away — poor, poor John S ! Close by is a 

short, plain man, with a look of fevered and 
patient endurance that haunts one now to 
think of. "It's my eyes. I'm afraid they're 
getting worse. I was hit in the head, you see. 
Yes, the pain's bad — sometimes." The nurse 
looks at him anxiously as we pass, and explains 
what is being tried to give relief. 

This devotion of the nurses — how can one 
ever say enough of it! I recall the wrath of 
a medical officer in charge of a large hospital 
at Rouen. "Why don't they give more Red 
Crosses to the working nurses? They don't 



126 ENGLAND'S EFFORT 

get half enough recognition. I have a nurse 
here who has been twelve months in the oper- 
ating theatre. She ought to have a V. C. ! — 
It's worth it." 

And here is a dark-eyed young officer who 
had come from a distant colony to fight for 
England. I find him in an officers' hospital, 
established not long after the war broke out, 
in a former Casino, where the huge baccarat- 
room has been turned into two large and splen- 
did wards. He is quite ready to talk about 
his wound, which is in the shoulder, but much 
more ready to talk about his Sister. 

"It's simply wonderful what they do for 
us !" he says, all his face lighting up. "When 
I was worst there wasn't an hour in the day or 
night my Sister wasn't ready to try anything 
in the world to help me. But they're all like 
that." 

Let me here gratefully recall, also, the hos- 
pitals organised by the Universities of Chicago 
and Harvard, entirely staffed by American 
Sisters and Doctors, each of them providing 34 
doctors and 80 nurses, and dealing with 1,040 
patients, and the Convalescent Depot of 2,000 
beds, where the men were outside, gardening 
and lounging in the spring sunshine. 

Twenty thousand wounded ! — while every 



ENGLAND'S EFFORT 127 

day the ambulance trains come and go from the 
front, or to other bases — there to fill up one 
or other of the splendid hospital ships that 
take our brave fellows back to England, and 
home, and rest. And this city of hospitals, 
under its hard-pressed medical chief, with all 
its wealth of scientific invention, and tender 
device, and unremitting care, with its wonder- 
ful health and recovery statistics, has been the 
growth of just twelve months. It makes one 
laugh and cry in a breath — for the mad havoc 
of war, on the one hand, for the power of the 
human brain, and the goodness of the human 
heart on the other. 



II 

It was late on the 29th of February that we 
reached our next resting-place, to find a kind 
greeting from the Base Commandant and final 
directions for our journey of the morrow. We 
put up at one of the old commercial inns of the 
town (it is not easy to find hotel quarters there 
of any kind just now, when every building at 
all suitable has been pressed into the hospital 
service) and I found delight in watching the 
various types of French officers, naval and 
military, who came in to the table d'hote, plung- 



128 ENGLAND'S EFFORT 

ing as soon as they had thrown off their caps 
and cloaks, and while they waited for their 
consomme, into the papers with the latest news 
of Verdun. But we were too tired to try and 
talk! The morning came quickly, and with 
it our escort from G. H. Q. We said good-bye 
to Colonel S., who had guided our journey so 
smoothly through all the fierce drawbacks of 
the weather, and made friends at once with 
our new guide, the staff-officer who deals with 
the guests of G. H. Q. Never shall I forget 
that morning's journey! I find in my notes: 
"A beautiful drive — far more beautiful than I 
had expected — over undulating country, with 
distant views of interlocking downs, and along 
typical French roads, tree or forest bordered, 
running straight as a line up-hill and down-hill, 
over upland and plain. One exquisite point of 
view especially comes back to me, where a road 
to the coast — that coast which the Germans so 
nearly reached! — diverged upon our left, and 
all the lowlands westward came into sight. It 
was pure Turner, the soft sunlight of the day, 
with its blue shadows, and pale-blue sky; the 
yellow chalk hills, still marked with streaks of 
snow; the woods, purple and madder brown; 
the distances ethereally blue; and the villages, 
bare and unlovely compared to the villages of 



ENGLAND'S EFFORT 129 

Kent and Sussex, but expressing a strong old 
historic life, sprung from the soil, and one with 
it. The first distant glimpse, as we turned a 
hill-corner, of the old town which was our 
destination — extraordinarily fine ! — its ancient 
church a towered mass of luminous grey under 
the sunshine, gathering the tiled roofs into one 
harmonious whole." 

But we avoided the town itself and found 
ourselves presently descending an avenue of 
trees to the eighteenth-century chateau, which 
is used by G. H. Q. as a hostel for its guests 
— allied and neutral correspondents, military 
attaches, special missions, and the like. In a 
few minutes I found myself standing bewil- 
dered by the strangeness and the interest of 
it all, in a charming Louis-Quinze room, plain 
and simple in the true manner of the genuine 
French country house, but with graceful pan- 
elled walls, an old armoire of the date, win- 
dows wide open to the spring sun, and a 
half -wild garden outside. A femme de menage, 
much surprised to be waiting on two ladies, 
comes to look after us. And this is France ! — 
and we are only thirty miles from that fighting 
fine, which has drawn our English hearts to it 
all these days ! 

A map is waiting for each of us down-stairs, 



130 ENGLAND'S EFFORT 

and we are told, roughly, where it is proposed 
to take us. A hurried lunch, and we are in the 

motor again, with Captain sitting in front. 

"You have your passes?" he asks us, and we 
anxiously verify the new and precious papers 
that brought us from our last stage, and will 
have to be shown on our way. We drive first 
to Arques, and Hazebrouck, then southeast. 
At a certain village we call at the Divisional 
Headquarters. The General comes out him- 
self, and proposes to guide us on. "I will take 
you as near to the fighting line as I can." 
On we went, in two motors; the General 

with me, Captain and D. following. We 

passed through three villages, and after the 
first we were within shell range of the German 
batteries ahead. But I cannot remember giv- 
ing a thought to the fact, so absorbing to the 
unaccustomed eye were all the accumulating 
signs of the actual battle-line; the endless rows 
of motor-lorries, either coming back from, or 
going up to the front, now with food, now with 
ammunition, reserve trenches to right and left 
of the road; a "dump" or food-station, whence 
carts filled from the heavy lorries go actually 
up to the trenches, lines of artillery wagons, 
parks of ammunition, or motor-ambulances, 
long lines of picketed horses, motor-cyclists 



ENGLAND'S EFFORT 131 

dashing past. In one village we saw a merry 
crowd in the little place gathered round a field- 
kitchen whence came an excellent fragrance of 
good stew. A number of the men were wear- 
ing leeks in their ears for St. David's Day. 
"You're Welsh, then?" I said to one of the 
cooks (by this time we had left the motor and 
were walking). "I'm not!" said the little 
fellow, with a laughing look. "It's St. Pat- 
rick's Day I'm waitin' for! But I've no ob- 
jection to givin' St. David a turn!" 

He opened his kitchen to show me the good 
things going on, and as we moved away there 
came up a marching platoon of men from the 
trenches, who had done their allotted time there 
and were coming back to billets. The General 
went to greet them. "Well, my boys, you 
could stick it all right ? " Nothing wrong with 
you?" It was good to see the lightening on 
the tired faces, and to watch the group dis- 
appear into the cheerful hubbub of the vil- 
lage. 

We walked on, and outside the village I 
heard the guns for the first time. We were 
now "actually in the battle," according to my 
companion, and a shell was quite possible, 
though not probable. Again, I can't remember 
that the fact made any impression upon us. 



132 ENGLAND'S EFFORT 

We were watching now parties of men at reg- 
ular intervals sitting waiting in the fields be- 
side the road, with their rifles and kits on the 
grass near them. They were waiting for the 
signal to move up toward the firing line as soon 
as the dusk was further advanced. "We shall 
meet them later," said the General, "as we 
come back." 

At the same moment he turned to address a 
young artillery-officer in the road: "Is your 
gun near here?" "Yes, sir, I was just going 
back to it." He was asked to show us the 
way. As we followed I noticed the white 
puff of a shell, far ahead, over the flat, ditch- 
lined fields; a captive balloon was making ob- 
servations about half a mile in front, and an 
aeroplane passed over our heads. "Ah, not 

a Boche," said Captain regretfully. "But 

we brought a Boche down here yesterday, 
just over this village — a splendid fight." 

Meanwhile, the artillery fire was quickening. 
We reached a ruined village from which all 
normal inhabitants had been long since cleared 
away. The shattered church was there, and I 
noticed a large crucifix quite intact still hang- 
ing on its chancel wall. A little farther and 
the boyish artillery -officer, our leader, who had 
been by this time joined by a comrade, turned 



ENGLAND'S EFFORT 133 

and beckoned to the General. Presently we 
were creeping through seas of mud down into 
the gun emplacement, so carefully concealed 
that no aeroplane overhead could guess it. 

There it was — how many of its fellows I had 
seen in the Midland and northern workshops ! 
— its muzzle just showing in the dark, and nine 
or ten high-explosive shells lying on the bench 
in front of the breach. One is put in. We 
stand back a little, and a sergeant tells me to 
put my fingers in my ears and look straight at 
the gun. Then comes the shock — not so vio- 
lent as I had expected — and the cartridge-case 
drops out. The shell has sped on its way to 
the German trenches — with what result to 
human flesh and blood? But I remember 
thinking very little of that — till afterwards. 
At the time, the excitement of the shot and of 
watching that little group of men in the dark- 
ness held all one's nerves gripped. 

In a few more minutes we were scrambling 
out again through the deep, muddy trench lead- 
ing to the dugout, promising to come back to 
tea with the officers, in their billet, when our 
walk was done. 

Now indeed we were "in the battle" ! Our 
own guns were thundering away behind us, and 
the road was more and more broken up by 



134 ENGLAND'S EFFORT 

shell holes. "Look at that group of trees to 
your left — beyond it is Neuve Chapelle," said 
the General beside me. "And you see those 
ruined cottages, straight ahead, and the wood 
behind." He named a wood thrice famous in 
the history of the war. "Our lines are just be- 
yond the cottages, and the German lines just in 
front of the wood. How far are we from them ? 
Three-quarters of a mile." It was discussed 
whether we should be taken zigzag through the 
fields to the entrance of the communication- 
trench. But the firing was getting hotter, and 

Captain was evidently relieved when we 

elected to turn back. Shall I always regret 
that lost opportunity? You did ask me to 
write something about "the life of the soldiers 
in the trenches" — and that was the nearest 
that any woman could personally have come 
to it ! But I doubt whether anything more — 
anything, at least, that was possible — could 
have deepened the whole effect. We had been 
already nearer than any woman — even a nurse 
— has been, in this war, to the actual fighting 
on the English line, and the cup of impres- 
sions was full. 

As we turned back, I noticed a little ruined 
cottage, with a Red Cross flag floating. Our 
guide explained that it was a field dressing- 



ENGLAND'S EFFORT 135 

station. It was not for us — who could not help 
— to ask to go in. But the thought of it — there 
were some badly wounded in it — pursued me 
as we walked on through the beautiful evening. 

A little farther we came across what I think 
moved me more than anything else in that 
crowded hour — those same companies of men 
we had seen sitting waiting in the fields, now 
marching quietly, spaced one behind the other, 
up to the trenches, to take their turn there. 
Every day I am accustomed to see bodies, 
small and large, of khaki-clad men, marching 
through these Hertfordshire lanes. But this 
was different. The bearing was erect and 
manly, the faces perfectly cheerful; but there 
was the seriousness in them of men who knew 
well the day's work to which they were going. 
I caught a little quiet whistling, sometimes, 
but no singing. We greeted them as they 
passed, with a shy "Good luck!" and they 
smiled shyly back, surprised, of course, to see 
a couple of women on that road. But there was 
no shyness towards the General. It was very 
evident that the relations between him and 
them were as good as affection and confidence 
on both sides could make them. 

I still see the bright tea-table in that cor- 
ner of a ruined farm, where our young officers 



136 ENGLAND'S EFFORT 

presently greeted us — the General marking our 
maps to make clear where we had actually 
been — the Captain of the battery springing up 
to show off his gramophone — while the guns 
crashed at intervals close beside us, range- 
finding, probably, searching out a portion of 
the German line, under the direction of some 
hidden observer with his telephone. It was 
over all too quickly. Time was up, and soon 
the motor was speeding back towards the 
Divisional Headquarters. The General and I 
talked of war, and what could be done to stop 
it. A more practical religion "lifting mankind 
again"? — a new St. Francis, preaching the old 
things in new ways ? "But in this war we had 
and we have no choice. We are fighting for 
civilisation and freedom, and we must go on 
till we win." 



Ill 

It was long before I closed my eyes in the 
pretty room of the old chateau, after an eve- 
ning spent in talk with some officers of the 
Headquarters Staff. When I woke in the 
dawn I little guessed what the day (March 
2nd) was to bring forth, or what was already 
happening thirty miles away on the firing line. 



ENGLAND'S EFFORT 137 

Zelie, the femme de menage, brought us our 
breakfast to our room, coffee and bread and 
eggs, and by half past nine we were down-stairs, 
booted and spurred, to find the motor at the 
door, a simple lunch being packed up, and gas- 
helmets got ready ! "We have had a very suc- 
cessful action this morning," said Captain , 

evidently in the best of spirits. "We have ta- 
ken back some trenches on the Ypres-Comines 
Canal that we lost a little while ago, and cap- 
tured about 200 prisoners. If we go off at 
once, we shall be in time to see the German 
counter-attack. ' ' 

It was again fine, though not bright, and the 
distances far less clear. This time we struck 
northeast, passing first the sacred region of 
G. H. Q. itself, where we showed our passes. 
Then after making our way through roads lined 
interminably, as on the previous day, with the 
splendid motor-lorries laden with food and 
ammunition, which have made such a new 
thing of the transport of this war, interspersed 
with rows of ambulances and limbered wagons, 
with flying-stations and horse lines, we climbed 
a hill to one of the finest positions in this north- 
ern land; an old town, where Gaul and Roman, 
Frank and Fleming, English and French have 
clashed, which looks out northward towards the 



138 ENGLAND'S EFFORT 

Yser and Dunkirk, and east towards Ypres. 
Now, if the mists will only clear, we shall see 
Ypres! But, alas, they lie heavy over the 
plain, and we descend the hill again without 
that vision. Now we are bound for Pope- 
ringhe, and must go warily, because there is a 
lively artillery action going on beyond Pope- 
ringhe, and it is necessary to find out what 
roads are being shelled. 

On the way we stop at an air-station, to 
watch the aeroplanes rising and coming down, 
and at a point near Poperinghe we were taken 
over a casualty-clearing station — a collection of 
hospital huts, with storehouses and staff quar- 
ters — by the medical officer in charge. Here 
were women nurses who are not allowed in the 
field dressing-stations nearer the line. There 
were not many wounded, though they were 
coming in, and the Doctor was not for the 
moment very busy. 

We stood on the threshold of a large ward, 
where we could not, I think, be seen. At the 
farther end a serious case was being attended 
by nurses and surgeons. Everything was pass- 
ing in silence; and to me it was as if there 
came from the distant group a tragic message 
of suffering, possibly death. Then, as we 
passed lingeringly away, we saw three young 



ENGLAND'S EFFORT 139 

officers, all wounded, running up from the 
ambulance at the gate, which had just brought 
them, and disappearing into one of the wards. 
The first — a splendid kilted figure — had his 
head bound up; the others were apparently 
wounded in the arm. But they seemed to walk 
on air, and to be quite unconscious that any- 
thing was wrong with them. It had been a 
success, a great success, and they had been in it ! 
The ambulances were now arriving fast from 
the field dressing-stations and field ambulances 
close to the line, and we hurried away, and were 
soon driving through Poperinghe. Here and 
there there was a house damaged with shell-fire. 
The little town indeed with its picturesque 
place is constantly shelled. But, all the same, 
life seems to go on as usual. The Poperinghe 
boy, like his London brother, hangs on the 
back of carts; his father and mother come 
to their door to watch what is going on, or to 
ask eagerly for news of the counter-attack; and 
his little brothers and sisters go tripping to 
school, in short cloaks with the hoods drawn 
over their heads, as though no war existed. 
Here and in the country round, poor, robbed 
Belgium is still at home on her own soil, and 
on the best of terms with the English Army, 
by which, indeed, this remnant of her pros- 



140 ENGLAND'S EFFORT 

pers greatly. As I have already insisted, the re- 
lations everywhere between the British soldier 
and the French and Belgian populations are 
among the British — or shall I say the Allied ? — 
triumphs of the war. 

Farther on the road a company from a fa- 
mous regiment, picked men all of them, comes 
swinging along, fresh from their baths! — life 
and force in every movement — young Harrys 
with their beavers on. Then, a house where 
men have their gas-helmets tested — a very 
strict and necessary business; and another, 
where an ex-Balliol tutor and Army Chaplain 
keeps open doors for the soldier in his hours of 
rest or amusement. But we go in search of a 
safe road to a neighbouring village, where some 
fresh passes have to be got. Each foot now of 
the way is crowded with the incidents and ap- 
purtenances of war, and war close at hand. 
An Australian transport base is pointed out, 
with a wholly Australian staff. "Some of the 
men," says our guide, "are millionaires." 
Close by is an aeroplane descending unexpect- 
edly in a field, and a crowd of men rushing to 
help; and we turn away relieved to see the 
two aviators walking off unhurt. Meanwhile, 
I notice a regular game of football going on 
at a distance, and some carefully written names 



ENGLAND'S EFFORT 141 

of bypaths— "Hyde Park Corner," "Picca- 
dilly," "Queen Mary's Road," and the like. 
The animation, the life of the scene are inde- 
scribable. 

At the next village the road was crowded 
both with natives and soldiers to see the Ger- 
man prisoners brought in. Alack! we did not 
see them. Ambulances were passing and re- 
passing, the slightly wounded men in cars open 
at the back, the more serious cases in closed 
cars, and everywhere the same va et vient of 
lorries and wagons, of staff-cars and motor- 
cyclists. It was not right for us to add to the 
congestion in the road. Moreover, the hours 
were drawing on, and the great sight was still 
to come. But to have watched those prisoners 
come in would have somehow rounded off the 
day! 

IV 

Our new passes took us to the top of a hill 
well known to the few onlookers of which this 
war admits. The motor stopped at a point 
on the road where a picket was stationed, who 
examined our papers. Then came a stiff and 
muddy climb, past a dugout for protection 
in case of shelling, Captain carrying the 



142 ENGLAND'S EFFORT 

three gas-helmets. At the top was a flat green 
space — three or four soldiers playing football 
on it ! — and an old windmill, and farm-build- 
ings. 

We sheltered behind the great beams support- 
ing the windmill, and looked out through them, 
north and east, over a wide landscape; a plain 
bordered eastward by low hills, every mile of 
it, almost, watered by British blood, and con- 
secrate to British dead. As we reached the 
windmill, as though in sombre greeting, the 
floating mists on the near horizon seemed to 
part, and there rose from them a dark, jagged 
tower, one side of it torn away. It was the 
tower of Ypres — mute victim! — mute witness 
to a crime, that, beyond the reparations of our 
own day, history will avenge through years 
to come. 

A flash! — another! — from what appear to 
be the ruins at its base. It is the English guns 
speaking from the lines between us and Ypres; 
and as we watch we see the columns of white 
smoke rising from the German lines as the shells 
burst. There they are, the German lines — 
along the Messines ridge. We make them out 
quite clearly, thanks to a glass and Captain 

's guidance. Their guns, too, are at work, 

and a couple of their shells are bursting on our 



ENGLAND'S EFFORT 143 

trenches somewhere between Vlamertinghe and 
Dickebusche. Then the rattle of our machine- 
guns — as it seems from somewhere close below 
us, and again the boom of the artillery. 

The counter-action is in progress, and we 
watch what can be seen or guessed of it, in 
fascination. We are too far off to see what 
is actually happening between the opposing 
trenches, but one of the chief fields of past and 
present battle, scenes which our children and 
our children's children will go to visit, lie 
spread out before us. Half the famous sites 
of the earlier war can be dimly made out be- 
tween us and Ypres. In front of us is the gleam 
of the Zillebeke Lake, beyond it Hooge. Hill 
60 is in that band of shadow; a little farther 
east the point where the Prussian Guard was 
mown down at the close of the first Battle of 
Ypres; farther south the fields and woods made 
for ever famous by the charge of the Household 
Cavalry, by the deeds of the Worcesters, and 
the London Scottish, by all the splendid valour 
of that "thin red line," French and English, 
cavalry and infantry, which in the first Battle 
of Ypres withstood an enemy four times as 
strong, saved France, and thereby England, 
and thereby Europe. In that tract of ground 
over which we are looking lie more than 



144 ENGLAND'S EFFORT 

100,000 graves, English and French; and to it 
the hearts of two great nations will turn for 
all time. Then if you try to pierce the northern 
haze, beyond that ruined tower, you may follow 
in imagination the course of the Yser westward 
to that Belgian coast where Admiral Hood's 
guns broke down and scattered the German 
march upon Dunkirk and Calais; or if you 
turn south you are looking over the Belfry of 
Bailleul, towards Neuve Chapelle, and Festu- 
bert, and all the fierce fighting-ground round 
Souchez and the Labyrinth. Once English and 
French stood linked here in a common heroic 
defence. Now the English hold all this line 
firmly from the sea to the Somme; while the 
French, with the eyes of the world upon them, 
are making history, hour by hour, at Verdun. 
So to this point we have followed one branch 
— the greatest — of England's effort; and the 
mind, when eyes fail, pursues it afresh from its 
beginnings when we first stood to arms in 
August, 1914, through what Mr. Buchan has 
finely called the "rally of the Empire," through 
the early rush and the rapid growth of the 
new armies, through the strengthening of 
Egypt, the disaster of Gallipoli, the seizure of 
the German Colonies; through all that vast 
upheaval at home which we have seen in the 



ENGLAND'S EFFORT 145 

munition areas; through that steady, and ever- 
growing organisation on the friendly French 
soil we have watched in the supply bases. Yet 
here, for us, it culminates; and here and in the 
North Sea, we can hardly doubt — whatever may 
be the diversions in other fields — will be fought, 
for Great Britain, the decisive battles of the 
war. As I turn to those dim lines on the Mes- 
sines ridge, I have come at last to sight of 
whither it all moves. There, in those trenches 
is The Aggressor — the enemy who has wantonly 
broken the peace of Europe, who has befouled 
civilisation with deeds of lust and blood, be- 
tween whom and the Allies there can be no 
peace till the Allies' right arm dictates it. 
Every week, every day, the British Armies 
grow, the British troops pour steadily across 
the Channel, and to the effort of England and 
her Allies there will be no truce till the right- 
eous end is won. 

But the shadows are coming down on the 
great scene, and with the sound of the guns still 
in our ears we speed back through the crowded 
roads to G. H. Q., and these wonderful days 
are over. Now, all that remains for me is to 
take you, far away from this great scene, into 
the English homes whence the men righting 
here are drawn, and to show you, if I can, very 



146 ENGLAND'S EFFORT 

shortly, by a few instances, what rich and poor 
are doing as individuals to feed the effort of 
England in this war. What of the young, of all 
classes and opportunities, who have laid down 
their lives in this war? What of the mothers 
who reared them, the schools and universities 
which sent them forth ? — the comrades who are 
making ready to carry on their work? You 
ask me as to the spirit of the nation — the foun- 
dation of all else. Let us look into a few lives, 
a few typical lives and families, and see. 



VI 

Dear H. 

As I begin upon this final letter to you comes 
the news that the threatened split in the Brit- 
ish Cabinet owing to the proposed introduction 
of general military service has been averted, 
and that at a Secret Session to be held next 
Tuesday, April 25th, Ministers will, for the 
first time, lay before both Houses of Parlia- 
ment full and complete information — much 
more full and complete at any rate, than has 
yet been given — of the "effort" of Great Britain 
in this world war, what this country is doing 
in sea-power, in the provision of Armies, in the 
lending of money to our Allies, in our own 
shipping service to them, and in our supply to 
them of munitions, coal, and other war material 
— including boots and clothing. If, then, our 
own British Parliament will be for the first 
time fully apprised next Tuesday of what the 
nation has been doing, it is, perhaps, small 
wonder that you on your side of the Atlantic 
have not rightly understood the performance 
of a nation which has, collectively, the same 

147 



148 ENGLAND'S EFFORT 

love of "grousing" as the individual British 
soldier shows in the trenches. 

Let me, however, go back and recapitulate 
a little. 

In the first of these letters, I tried, by a 
rapid "vision" of the Fleet, as I personally 
saw an important section of it amid the snows 
of February, to point to the indispensable con- 
dition of this "effort," without which it could 
never have been made, without which it could 
not be maintained for a day, at the present 
moment. Since that visit of mine, the power 
of the Fleet and the effect of the Fleet have 
strengthened week by week. The blockade of 
Germany is far more effective than it was three 
months ago; the evidence of its growing strin- 
gency accumulates steadily, while at the same 
time the British Foreign Office has been anx- 
iously trying, and evidently with much success, 
to minimise for neutrals its inevitable difficul- 
ties and inconveniences. Meanwhile, as Mr. 
Asquith will explain next Tuesday, the expendi- 
ture on the war, not only on our own needs 
but on those of our Allies is colossal — terrify- 
ing. The most astonishing Budget of English 
History, demanding a fourth of his income 
from every well-to-do citizen, has been brought 
in since I began to write these letters, and 



ENGLAND'S EFFORT 149 

quietly accepted. Five hundred millions ster- 
ling ($2,500,000,000) have been already lent to 
our Allies. We are spending at the yearly rate 
of 600,000,000 sterling ($3,000,000,000) on the 
Army; 200,000,000 sterling on the Navy; while 
the Munitions Department is costing about 
two-thirds as much (400,000,000 sterling) as 
the rest of the Army, and is employing close 
upon 2,000,000 workers, one-tenth of them 
women. The export trade of the country, in 
spite of submarines and lack of tonnage, is at 
the moment greater than it was in the corre- 
sponding months of 1913. 

As to what we have got for our money, 
Parliament has authorised an Army of 4,000,000 
men, and it is on the question of the last half 
million that England's Effort now turns. Mr. 
Asquith will explain everything that has been 
done, and everything that still remains to do, 
in camera to Parliament next Tuesday. But 
do not, my dear friend, make any mistake ! 
England will get the men she wants; and Labour 
will be in the end just as determined to get 
them as any other section of the Community. 
Meanwhile, abroad, while we seem, for the 
moment, in France to be inactive, we are in 
reality giving the French at Verdun just that 
support which they and General Joffre desire, 



150 ENGLAND'S EFFORT 

and — it can scarcely be doubted — preparing 
great things on our own account. In spite of 
our failure in Gallipoli, and the anxious posi- 
tion of General Townshend's force, Egypt is no 
longer in danger of attack, if it ever had been; 
our sea-power has brought a Russian force 
safely to Marseilles; and the possibilities of 
British and Russian Collaboration in the East 
are rapidly opening out. As to the great and 
complex war-machine we have been steadily — 
ay, and rapidly — building upon French soil, as 
I tried to show in my fourth letter, whether in 
the supply bases, or in the war organisation 
along the ninety miles of front now held by the 
British Armies, it would indeed astonish those 
dead heroes of the Retreat from Mons — could 
they come back to see it! We are not satis- 
fied with it yet — hence the unrest in Parlia- 
ment and the Press — we shall never be satis- 
fied — till Germany has accepted the terms of 
the Allies. But those who know England best 
have no doubt whatever as to the temper of 
the nation which has so far "improvised the 
impossible," in the setting up of this machine, 
and means, in the end, to get out of it what it 
wants. 

The temper of the nation? In this last 
letter let me take some samples of it. First — 



ENGLAND'S EFFORT 151 

what have the rich been doing ? As to money, 
the figures of the income-tax, the death-duties, 
and the various war loans are there to show 
what they have contributed to the State. The 
Joint War Committee of the Red Cross and 
the St. John's Ambulance Association has col- 
lected — though not, of course, from the rich 
only — close on 4,000,000 sterling (between 
$18,000,000 and $19,000,000), and the Prince 
of Wales Fund nearly 6,000,000 ($30,000,000). 
The lavishness of English giving, indeed, in 
all directions, during the last two years, 
could hardly I think have been outdone. A 
few weeks ago I w T alked with the Duke of 
Bedford through the training and reinforce- 
ment camp, about fifteen miles from my 
own home in the country, which he him- 
self commands and which, at the outbreak 
of war, he himself built without waiting for 
public money or War Office contractors, to 
house and train recruits for the various Bed- 
fordshire regiments. The camp holds 1,200 
men, and is ranged in a park where the oaks 
— still standing — were considered too old by 
Oliver Cromwell's Commissioners to furnish 
timber for the English Navy. Besides ample 
barrack accommodation in comfortable huts, 
planned so as to satisfy every demand whether 



152 ENGLAND'S EFFORT 

of health or convenience, all the opportunities 
that Aldershot offers, on a large scale, are here 
provided in miniature. The model trenches 
with the latest improvements in plan, revet- 
ting, gun-emplacements, sally-ports, and the 
rest, spread through the sandy soil, the mus- 
ketry ranges, bombing and bayonet schools are 
of the most recent and efficient type. And the 
Duke takes a keen personal interest in every 
man in training, follows his progress in camp, 
sees him off to the front, and very often re- 
ceives him, when wounded, in the perfectly 
equipped hospital which the Duchess has estab- 
lished in Woburn Abbey itself. Here the old 
riding-school, tennis-court, and museum, which 
form a large building fronting the abbey, have 
been turned into wards as attractive as bright 
and simple colour, space, flowers, and exquisite 
cleanliness can make them. The Duchess is 
herself the Matron in charge, under the War 
Office, keeps all the records, is up at half past 
five in the morning, and spends her day in the 
endless doing, thinking, and contriving that 
such a hospital needs. Not very far away 
stands another beautiful country house, rented 
by Mr. and Mrs. Whitelaw Reid when they 
were in England. It also is a hospital, but its 
owner, Lord Lucas, not at all a rich man, has 



ENGLAND'S EFFORT 153 

now given it irrevocably to the nation for the 
use of disabled soldiers, together with as much 
land as may suffice a farm colony chosen from 
among them. The beautiful hospital of 250 
beds at Paignton, in North Devon, run entirely 
by women of American birth now resident in 
Great Britain, without any financial aid from 
the British Government, was another large 
country house given to the service of the 
wounded by Mr. Singer. Lady Sheffield's hos- 
pital for 25 beds at Alderley Park, is an exam- 
ple of how part of a country house with all its 
green and restful surroundings may be used 
for those who have suffered in the war, and it 
has many fellows in all parts of England. 
Altogether about 700 country houses, large and 
small, have been offered to the War Office. 

But money and houses are the very least 
part of what the old families, the rich manu- 
facturers, or the educated class generally have 
offered to their country in this war. Democ- 
racy has gone far with us, but it may still be 
said that the young heir to a great name, to 
estates with which his family has been con- 
nected for generations, and to the accumulated 
"consideration" to use a French word in a 
French sense, which such a position almost 
always carries with it — has a golden time in 



154 ENGLAND'S EFFORT 

English life. Difficulties that check others fall 
away from him; he is smiled upon for his kin- 
dred's sake before he makes friends for his own; 
the world is overkind to his virtues and blind 
to his faults; he enters manhood indeed as 
"one of our conquerors"; and it will cost him 
some trouble to throw away his advantages. 
Before the war such a youth was the common 
butt of the Socialist orator. He was the typi- 
cal "shirker" and "loafer," while other men 
worked; the parasite bred from the sweat of 
the poor; the soft, effeminate creature who had 
never faced the facts of life and never would. 
As to his soldiering — the common profession 
of so many of his kind — that was only another 
offence in the eyes of politicians like Mr. Keir 
Hardie. When the class war came, he would 
naturally be found shooting down the work- 
men; but for any other war, an ignorant popin- 
jay ! — incompetent even at his own trade, and 
no match whatever for the scientific soldier of 
the Continent. 

Those who knew anything of the Army were 
well aware long before 1914 that this type of 
officer — if he still existed, as no doubt he had 
once existed — had become extraordinarily rare; 
that since the Boer War, the level of education 
in the Army, the standard of work demanded, 



ENGLAND'S EFFORT 155 

the quality of the relations between officers 
and men had all steadily advanced. And with 
regard to the young men of the "classes" in 
general, those who had to do with them, at 
school and college, while fully alive to their 
weaknesses, yet cherished convictions which 
were more instinct than anything else, as to 
what stuff these easy-going, sport-loving fellows 
might prove to be made of in case of emergency. 
Well, the emergency came. These youths 
of the classes, heirs to titles and estates, or just 
younger sons of the old squirearchy of England, 
so far as it still survives, went out in their 
hundreds, with the old and famous regiments 
of the British line, in the Expeditionary Force, 
and perished in their hundreds. Forty-seven 
eldest sons, heirs to English peerages had fallen 
within a year of the outbreak of war — among 
them the heirs to such famous houses as Long- 
leat, Petworth, and Castle Ashby — and the 
names of Grenfell, Hood, Stuart, Bruce, Lister, 
Douglas Pennant, Worsley, Hay, St. Aubyn, 
Carington, Annesley, Hicks Beach — together 
with those of men whose fathers have played 
prominent parts in the politics or finance of 
the last half century. And the first ranks have 
been followed by what one might almost call a 
levee en masse of those that remained. Their 



156 ENGLAND'S EFFORT 

blood has been spilt like water at Ypres and 
La Bassee, at Suvla and Helles. Whatever 
may be said henceforward of these "golden 
lads" of ours, "shirker" and "loafer" they 
can never be called again. They have died 
too lavishly, their men have loved and trusted 
them too well for that — and some of the work- 
ing-class leaders, with the natural generosity of 
English hearts, have confessed it abundantly. 

And the professional classes — the intellec- 
tuals — everywhere the leading force of the na- 
tion — have done just as finely, and, of course, 
in far greater numbers. Never shall I forget 
my visit to Oxford last May — in the height of 
the summer term, just at that moment when 
Oxford normally is at its loveliest and fullest, 
brimming over with young life, the streets 
crowded with caps and gowns, the river and 
towing-path alive with the "flannelled fools," 
who have indeed flung back Rudyard Kipling's 
gibe — if it ever applied to them — with interest. 
For they had all disappeared. They were in 
the trenches, landing at Suvla, garrisoning 
Egypt, pushing up to Baghdad. The colleges 
contained a few forlorn remnants — under age, 
or medically unfit. The river, on a glorious 
May day, showed boats indeed, but girls were 
rowing them. Oriel, the college of Arnold, of 



ENGLAND'S EFFORT 157 

Newman, of Cecil Rhodes, was filled with 
women students, whose own college, Somer- 
ville, had become a hospital. The Examina- 
tion Schools in the High Street were a hospital, 
and the smell of disinfectants displaced the 
fragrance of lilac and hawthorn for ever associ- 
ated in the minds of Oxford's lovers with the 
summer term. In New College gardens, there 
were white tents full of wounded. I walked up 
and down that wide deserted lawn of St. John's, 
where Charles I once gathered his Cavaliers, 
with an old friend, an Oxford tutor of forty 
years' standing, who said with a despairing ges- 
ture, speaking of his pupils: "So many are 
gone — so many I — and the terrible thing is that 
I can't feel it as I once did — as blow follows 
blow one seems to have lost the power." 

Let me evoke the memory of some of them. 
From Balliol have gone the two Grenfell 
brothers, vehement, powerful souls, not de- 
lightful to those who did not love them, not 
just, often, to those they did not love, but full 
of that rich stuff which life matures to all fine 
uses. The younger fell in the attack on 
Hooge, July 31st, last year; the elder, Julian, 
had fallen some months earlier. Julian's verses, 
composed the night before he was wounded, 
will be remembered with Rupert Brooke's son- 



158 ENGLAND'S EFFORT 

nets, as expressing the inmost passion of the 
war in great hearts. They were written in the 
spring weather of April last, and a month later 
the writer had died of his wounds. They tell 
how the fighting man has yet time to feel the 
spring, and watch the heavens and the wood- 
land trees: 

" The woodland trees that stand together 
They stand to him each one a friend; 
They gently speak in the windy weather; 
They guide to valley and ridge's end. 

" The kestrel hovering by day 

And the little owls that call by night, 
Bid him be swift and keen as they 
As keen of ear, as swift of sight. 

" The blackbird sings to him, * Brother, brother, 
If this be the last song you shall sing, 
Sing well, for you may not sing another 
Brother, sing.' 

"And when the burning moment breaks, 
And all things else are out of mind 
And only Joy of Battle takes 

Him by the throat and makes him blind 

" Through joy and blindness he shall know 
Not caring much to know, that still 
Nor lead nor steel shall reach him, so 
That it be not the Destined Wilt 



ENGLAND'S EFFORT 159 

" The thundering line of battle stands, 
And in the air Death moans and sings; 
But Day shall clasp him with strong hands, 
And Night shall fold him in soft wings." 

Another son of Oxford, Gilbert Talbot, will 
stand to many as the type of youth with all its 
treasure of life and promise unspent, poured 
out like spikenard at the feet of England. 
Already assured at Oxford of a brilliant career 
in politics, a fine speaker, a hard worker, pos- 
sessing by inheritance the charm of two fam- 
ilies always in the public eye and ear, and no 
less beloved than famous, he had just landed 
in the United States when the war broke out. 
He was going round the world with a friend, 
youth and ambition high within him. He 
turned back without a moment's hesitation, 
though soldiering had never been at all attrac- 
tive to him, and after his training went out to 
France. He was killed in Flanders in July 
last. His elder brother, an army chaplain, and 
ex-Balliol tutor, crawled out in the dark into 
that deadly space between the lines, where 
Gilbert lay, groped till he found the curly head, 
and knew that all was over. Of Charles Alfred 
Lister, Lord Ribblesdale's eldest son, an Ox- 
ford friend says: "There were almost infinite 
possibilities in his future." He was twice 



160 ENGLAND'S EFFORT 

wounded at the Dardanelles, was then offered 
a post of importance in the Foreign Office, re- 
fused it, and went back to the front — to die. 
But among the hundreds of memorial notices 
issued by the Oxford Colleges, the same note 
recurs and recurs, of unhesitating, uncalculated 
sacrifice. Older men, and younger men, Don, 
and undergraduate, lads of nineteen and twenty, 
and those who were already school-mastering, 
or practising at the Bar, or in business, they 
felt no doubts, they made no delays. Their 
country called, and none failed in that great 
Adsum. 

Cambridge of course has the same story to 
tell. One takes the short, pathetic biographies 
almost at random from the ever-lengthening 
record. Captain J. Lusk, 6th Cameronians, 
was already Director of an important steel 
works, engaged in Government business when 
war broke out, and might have honourably 
claimed exemption. Instead he offered him- 
self at once on mobilisation, and went out with 
his battalion to France last spring. On the 
15th of June, at Festubert, he was killed in vol- 
unteering to bring what was left of a frightfully 
battered battalion out of action. "What seems 
to me my duty as an officer," he once wrote to 
a friend, "is to carry my sword across the bar- 



ENGLAND'S EFFORT 161 

riers of death clean and bright." "This," says 
the friend who writes the notice, "he has 
done." Lieutenant Le Blanc Smith, of Trin- 
ity, machine-gun officer, was struck in the fore- 
head by a sniper's bullet while reconnoitring. 
His General and brother officers write: 

He was a very fine young officer. . . . Every one loved him. 
. . . His men would do anything for him. . . . 

And the sergeant of his machine-gun bri- 
gade says: 

Although only a non-commissioned officer myself, I feel I 
have lost my brother ; because he was so awfully good and kind to 
me and us all. 

Lieutenant Hamilton, aged twenty-five, says 
in a last letter to his father: 

Just a line while the beginning of the great battle is going on. 
It is wonderful how peaceful one feels amid it all. Any moment 
one may be put out of action, but one does not worry. That quiet 
time alone with God at the Holy Communion was most comforting. 

Immediately after writing these words, the 
writer fell in action. Captain Clarke, a famous 
Cambridge athlete, President of the C. U. A. C, 
bled to death — according to one account — from 
a frightful wound received in the advance near 



162 ENGLAND'S EFFORT 

Hooge on September 25th last. His last re- 
corded action — that traditional act of the dy- 
ing soldier! — was to give a drink from his 
flask to a wounded private. Of the general ac- 
tion of Cambridge men, the Master of Christ's 
writes: "Nothing has been more splendid than 
the way the young fellows have come forward; 
not only the athletes and the healthy, but in 
all cases the most unlikely men have rushed 
to the front, and have done brilliantly. The 
mortality, however, has been appalling. In an 
ordinary way one loses one killed to eight or 
nine wounded; but in this war the number of 
Cambridge men killed and missing practically 
equals the number of wounded." Of the effect 
upon the University an eye-witness says: "Of 
course the colleges are absolutely ruined. . . . 
Eighty per cent of the College rooms are vacant. 
Rows and rows of houses in Cambridge are to 
let. All the Junior Fellows are on service in 
one capacity or another, and a great many of 
the Seniors are working in Government Offices 
or taking school posts" — so that the school 
education of the Country may be carried on. 
Altogether, nearly 12,000 Cambridge men are 
serving; 980 have been wounded; 780 have 
been killed; 92 are missing. 

As to one's friends and kinsfolk, let me recall 



ENGLAND'S EFFORT 163 

the two gallant grandsons of my dear old friend 
and publisher, George Murray Smith, the orig- 
inal publisher of Jane Eyre, friend of Charlotte 
Bronte, and creator of the Dictionary of Na-. 
tional Biography. The elder one, who had just 
married before going out, fought all through the 
retreat from Mons, and fell in one of the early 
actions on the Flanders front. "He led us all 
the way," said one of his men afterwards. All 
the way ! — All through the immortal rear-guard 
actions of August, 1914 — only to fall, when the 
tide had turned, and the German onslaught on 
Paris had been finally broken! "In all my 
soldiering," writes a brother officer, "I have 
never seen a warmer feeling between men and 
their officer." "Was he not," asks a well- 
known Eton master, "that tall, smiling, strong, 
gentle-mannered boy at White-Thomson's?" — - 
possessing an "affectionate regard and feeling 
for others which boys as boys, especially if 
strong and popular, don't always, or indeed 
often possess." The poor parents were uncer- 
tain as to his fate for many weeks, but he finally 
died of his wounds in a hospital behind the 
German lines. Then, little more than six 
months later came the second blow. Geoffrey, 
the younger brother, aged nineteen, fell on 
September 29th, near Vermelles. Nothing 



164 ENGLAND'S EFFORT 

could be more touching than the letters from 
officers and men about this brave, sweet- 
tempered boy. "Poor old regiment!" writes 
the Colonel to the lad's father — "we were 
badly knocked about, and I brought out only 
3 officers and 375 men, but they did magnifi- 
cently, and it was thanks to officers like your 
son, who put the honour of the regiment be- 
fore all thought of fatigue or personal danger. 
Such a gallant lad! We all loved him." A 
private, the boy's soldier servant, who fought 
with him, writes: "I wish you could have seen 
him in that trench. . . • All the men say that 
he deserved the V. C. . . . I don't know if we 
are going back to those trenches any more, but 
if we do, I am going to try and lay Mr. Geoffrey 
to rest in some quiet place. . . . I cannot bear 
to think that I shall not be able to be with 
him any more." 

But how they crowd upon the mind — the 
"unreturning braves" ! Take our friends and 
neighbours in this quiet Hertfordshire country. 
All round us the blows have fallen — again and 
again the only son — sometimes two brothers 
out of three — the most brilliant — the best be- 
loved. And I see still the retreating figure 
of a dear nephew of my own, as he vanished 
under the trees waving his hand to us in 



ENGLAND'S EFFORT 165 

March last. A boy made of England's best — 
who after two years in Canada, and at the be- 
ginning of what must have been a remarkable 
career, heard the call of the Mother Country, 
and rushed home at once. He was transferred 
to an English regiment, and came to say good- 
bye to us in March. It was impossible to 
think of Christopher's coming to harm — such 
life and force, such wisdom and character also, 
in his strong, handsome face and thoughtful 
eyes! We talked of the future of Canada — 
not much of the war. Then he vanished, and 
I could not feel afraid. But one night in May, 
near Bailleul, he went out with a listening party 
between the trenches, was shot through both 
legs by a sniper, and otherwise injured — carried 
back to hospital, and after a few hours' vain 
hope, sank peacefully into eternity, knowing 
only that he had done his duty and fearing 
nothing. "Romance and melodrama," says 
Professor Gilbert Murray, in one of the noblest 
and most moving utterances of the war, "were 
once a memory — broken fragments living on 
of heroic ages in the past. We live no longer 
upon fragments and memories, we have entered 
ourselves upon an heroic age. ... As for me 
personally, there is one thought that is always 
with me — the thought that other men are dying 



166 ENGLAND'S EFFORT 

for me, better men, younger, with more hope 
in their lives, many of them men whom I have 
taught and loved." The orthodox Christian 
"will be familiar with that thought of One who 
loved you dying for you. I would like to say 
that now I seem to be familiar with the thought 
that something innocent, something great, 
something that loved me, is dying, and is dying 
daily for me. That is the sort of community 
we now are — a community in which one man 
dies for his brother; and underneath all our 
hatreds, our little anger and quarrels, we are 
brothers, who are ready to seal our brother- 
hood with blood. It is for us these men are 
dying — for the women, the old men, and the 
rejected men — and to preserve civilisation and 
the common life which we are keeping alive, 
or building." 

So much for the richer and the educated 
class. As to the rank and file, the Tommies 
who are fighting and dying for England in pre- 
cisely the same spirit as those who have had 
ten times their opportunities in this unequal 
world, I have seen them myself within a mile 
of the trenches, marching quietly up through 
the fall of the March evening to take their 
places in that fine, where, every night, however 
slack the fighting, a minimum of so many casu- 



ENGLAND'S EFFORT 167 

alties per mile, so many hideous or fatal in- 
juries by bomb or shell fire, is practically in- 
variable. Not the conscript soldiers of a 
military nation, to whom the thought of fight- 
ing has been perforce familiar from their child- 
hood ! Men, rather, who had never envisaged 
fighting, to whom it is all new, who at bottom, 
however firm their will, or wonderful their 
courage, hate war, and think it a loathsome 
business. "I do not find it easy," writes a 
chaplain at the front who knows his men and 
has shared all the dangers of their life — "to give 
incidents and sayings. I could speak of the 
courage of the wounded brought in after battle. 
How many times has one heard them telling 
the doctor to attend to others before them- 
selves! I could tell you of a very shy and 
nervous boy who, after an attack, dug, himself 
alone, with his intrenching tool, a little trench, 
under continuous fire, up which trench he after- 
wards crept backwards and forwards carrying 
ammunition to an advanced post; or of another 
who sat beside a wounded comrade for several 
hours under snipers' fire, and somehow built 
him a slight protection until night fell and 
rescue came. Such incidents are merely speci- 
mens of thousands which are never known. 
Indeed it is the heroism of all the men all the 



168 ENGLAND'S EFFORT 

time which has left the most lasting impression 
on my mind after thirteen months at the war. 
No one can conceive the strain which the daily 
routine of trench life entails, unless one has 
been among the men. They never show the 
slightest sign of unwillingness, and they do 
what they are told when and where they are 
told without questioning; no matter what the 
conditions or dangers, they come up smiling, 
and that is the soldier's privilege. ... It is, 
I think, what we all are feeling and are so proud 
of — this unbreakable spirit of self-sacrifice in 
the daily routine of trench warfare. We are 
proud of it because it is the highest of all forms 
of self-sacrifice, for it is not the act of a moment 
when the blood is up or the excitement of bat- 
tle is at fever heat; but it is demanded of the 
soldier, day in and day out, and shown by 
him coolly and deliberately, day in and day 
out, with death always at hand. We are proud 
of it, too, because it is so surely a sign of the 
magnificent 'moraV of our troops — and moral 
is going to play a very leading part as the war 
proceeds. . . . What is inspiring this splendid 
disregard of self is partly the certainty that the 
Cause is Right, partly, it is a hidden joy of 
conscience which makes them know that they 
would be unhappy if they were not doing their 



ENGLAND'S EFFORT 169 

bit — and partly (I am convinced of this, too,) 
it is a deepening faith in the Founder of their 
Faith Whom so many appreciate and value as 
never before, because they realise that even He 
has not shirked that very mill of suffering 
through which they are now passing them- 
selves." 

A few days ago, I accompanied a woman 
officer distributing some leaflets on behalf of 
a Government department, in some visits to 
families living in a block of model dwellings 
somewhere in South London. We called on 
nine families. In every single case the man 
of the family had gone, or was just going, to 
the war; except in one case, where a man who, 
out of pure patriotism and at great personal 
difficulty had joined the Volunteer Reserve at 
the outbreak of war, had strained his heart in 
trench-digging and was now medically unfit, 
to his own bitter disappointment. There was 
some grumbling in the case of one young 
wife that her husband should be forced to go 
before the single men whom she knew; but 
in the main the temper that showed itself 
bore witness both to the feeling and the in- 
telligence that our people are bringing to 
bear on the war. One woman said her hus- 
band was a sergeant in a well-known regiment. 



170 ENGLAND'S EFFORT 

He thought the world of his men, and when- 
ever one was killed, he must be at the burying. 
"He can't bear, you know" — she added shyly 
— "they should feel alone." She had three 
brothers-in-law "out" — one recently killed. 
One was an ambulance driver under the 
R. A. M. C. He had five small children, but 
had volunteered. "He doesn't say much about 
the war, except that 'Tommies are wonder- 
ful. They never complain.'" She notices a 
change in his character. He was always good 
to his wife and children — "but now he's splen- 
did!" The brother of another woman had 
been a jockey in Belgium, had liked the coun- 
try and the people. When war broke out 
he "felt he must fight for them." He came 
home at once and enlisted. Another brother 
had been a stoker on a war-ship at the Dar- 
danelles, and was in the famous landing of 
April £5. Bullets "thick and fast like hail- 
storm. Terrible times collecting the dead! 
Her brother had worked hard forming burial 
parties. Was now probably going to the Ti- 
gris. Wrote jolly letters !" 

Then there was the little woman, born and 
bred in the Army, with all the pride of the 
Army — a familiar type. Husband a sergeant 
in the Guards — was gymnastic instructor at a 



ENGLAND'S EFFORT 171 

northern town — and need not have gone to the 
war at all, but felt "as a professional soldier" 
he ought to go. Three brothers in the Army 
— one a little drummer-boy of sixteen, wounded 
in the retreat from Mons, had walked a mile 
dragging his broken leg. Her sailor brother 
had died — probably from exposure, in the 
North Sea. The most cheerful, plucky little 
creature! "We are Army people, and must 
expect to fight." 

Well — you say you "would like America to 
visualise the effort, the self-sacrifice of the Eng- 
lish men and women who are determined to 
see this war through." There was, I thought, 
a surprising amount of cheerful effort, of under- 
standing self-sacrifice in those nine homes, 
where my companion's friendly talk drew out 
the family facts without difficulty. And I am 
convinced that if I had spent days instead of 
hours in following her through the remaining 
tenements in these huge and populous blocks 
the result would have been practically the 
same. The nation is behind the war, and behind 
the Government — solidly determined to win this 
war, and build a new world after it. 

As to the work of our women, I have de- 
scribed something of it in the munition areas, 
and if this letter were not already too long, I 



172 ENGLAND'S EFFORT 

should like to dwell upon much else — the army 
of maidens, who, as V. A. D.'s, trained by the 
Red Cross, have come trooping from England's 
most luxurious or comfortable homes, and are 
doing invaluable work in hundreds of hospitals; 
to begin with, the most menial scrubbing and 
dish-washing, and by now the more ambitious 
and honourable — but not more indispensable — 
tasks of nursing itself. In this second year 
of the war, the first army of V. A. D.'s, now 
promoted, has everywhere been succeeded by 
a fresh levy, aglow with the same eagerness and 
the same devotion as the first. Or I could 
dwell on the women's hospitals — especially the 
remarkable hospital in Endell Street, directly 
under the War Office, which is entirely officered 
by women; where some hundreds of male pa- 
tients accept the surgical and medical care of 
women doctors, and adapt themselves to the 
light and easy discipline maintained by the 
women of the staff, with entire confidence and 
grateful good-will. To see a woman dentist at 
work on a soldier's mouth, and a woman quar- 
termaster presiding over her stores, and man- 
aging, besides, everything pertaining to the 
lighting, heating, and draining of the hospital, 
is one more sign of these changed and changing 
times. What, for women, will be the result of 



ENGLAND'S EFFORT 173 

tlie war — socially and politically? Who can 
tell ? All we know is that old feuds and bitter- 
nesses are dying away in the affairs of women 
as in so much else; and it ought to be possible 
— it surely will be possible — to bring a new 
spirit to bear on the old problems. 

So I come to the end of the task you set me ! 
— with what gaps and omissions to look back 
upon, no one knows so well as myself. This 
letter starts on its way to you at a critical 
moment for your great country. What will 
happen? Will Germany give way? If not, 
what sort of relations will shape themselves, 
and how quickly, between the Central Empires 
and America ? To express myself on this great 
matter is no part of my task; although no 
English man or woman but will watch its de- 
velopment with a deep and passionate inter- 
est. What may be best for you, we cannot 
tell; the military and political bearings of a 
breach between the United States and Germany 
on our own fortunes are by no means clear to 
us. But what we do want is the sympathy, the 
moral support and co-operation of your people. 
We have to thank you for a thousand gener- 
osities to our wounded; we bless you — as com- 
rades with you in that old Christendom which 
even this war shall not destroy — for what you 



174 ENGLAND'S EFFORT 

have done in Belgium — but we want you to 
understand the heart of England in this war, 
and not to be led away by the superficial diffi- 
culties and disputes that no great and free na- 
tion escapes in time of crisis. Sympathy with 
France — France, the invaded, the heroic — is 
easy for America — for us all. She is the great 
tragic figure of the war — the whole world does 
her homage. We are not invaded — and so less 
tragic, less appealing. But we are fighting the 
fight which is the fight of all freemen every- 
where — against the wantonness of military 
power, against the spirit that tears up treaties 
and makes peaceful agreement between nations 
impossible — against a cruelty and barbarism in 
war which brings our civilisation to shame. 
We have a right to your sympathy — you who 
are the heirs of Washington and Lincoln, the 
trustees of liberty in the New World as we, 
with France, are in the Old. You are con- 
cerned — you must be concerned — in the tri- 
umph of the ideals of ordered freedom and 
humane justice over the ideals of unbridled 
force and ruthless cruelty, as they have been 
revealed in this war, to the horror of mankind. 
The nation that can never, to all time, wash 
from its hands the guilt of the Belgium crime, 
the blood of the Lusitania victims, of the mas- 



ENGLAND'S EFFORT 175 

sacres of Louvain and Dinant, of Aerschot 
and Termonde, may some day deserve our 
pity. To-day it has to be met and conquered 
by a will stronger than its own, in the inter- 
ests of civilisation itself. 

This last week, at the close of which I am 
despatching this final letter, has been a som- 
bre week for England. It has seen the squalid 
Irish rising, with its seven days' orgy of fire 
and bloodshed in Dublin; it has seen the sur- 
render at Kut of General Townshend and his 
beleaguered men; it has seen also a strong 
demonstration in Parliament of discontent 
with certain phases of the conduct of the war. 
And yet, how shall I convey to you the para- 
dox that we in England — our soldiers at the 
front, and instructed opinion at home — have 
never been so certain of ultimate victory as 
we now are? It is the big facts that matter: 
the steady growth of British resources, in men 
and munitions, toward a maximum which we 
— and Russia — are only approaching, while 
that of the Central Empires is past; the deep- 
ening unity of an Empire which is being forged 
anew by danger and trial, and by the spirit 
of its sons all over the world — a unity against 
which the Irish outrage, paid for by German 
money, disavowed by all that is truly Ireland, 



176 ENGLAND'S EFFORT 

Unionist or Nationalist, and instantly effaced, 
as a mere demonstration, by the gallantry at 
the same moment of Irish soldiers in the battle- 
line — lifts its treacherous hand in vain; the 
increasing and terrible pressure of the British 
blockade of Germany, equivalent, as some one 
has lately said, every twenty-four hours that 
it is maintained, to a successful action in the 
field; the magnificent resistance of an indom- 
itable France; the mounting strength of a re- 
organised Russia. This island-state — let me 
repeat it with emphasis — was not prepared for, 
and had no expectation of a Continental war, 
such as we are now fighting. The fact cries 
aloud from the records of the struggle; it will 
command the ear of history; and it acquits 
us for ever from the guilt of the vast catas- 
trophe. But Great Britain has no choice now 
but to fight to the end — and win. She knows 
it, and those who disparage her are living in a 
blind world. As to the difficulty of the task 
— as to our own failures and mistakes in learn- 
ing how to achieve it — we have probably fewer 
illusions than those who criticise us. But we 
shall do it — or perish. 



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